Chapter XI: Book TWO: His Love (5)

And the bedroom could show one or two details that in a bedroom were luxurious. Chief of these were the carpet, the hearthrug, and the table. Edwin owed them to a marvellous piece of good fortune. He had feared, and even Maggie had feared, that their father would impair the practical value and the charm of the new house by parsimony in the matter of furniture. The furniture in the domestic portion of the old dwelling was quite inadequate for the new one, and scarcely fit for it either. Happily Darius had heard of a houseful of furniture for sale at Oldcastle by private treaty, and in a wild, adventurous hour he had purchased it, exceedingly cheap. Edwin had been amazed at his luck (he accepted the windfall as his own private luck) when he first saw the bought furniture in the new house, before the removal. Out of it he had selected the table, the carpet, and the rug for his bedroom, and none had demurred. He noticed that his father listened to him, in affairs of the new house, as to an individuality whose views demanded some trifle of respect. Beyond question his father was proving himself to possess a mind equal to the grand situation. What with the second servant and the furniture, Edwin felt that he would not have to blush for the house, no matter who might enter it to spy it out. As for his own room, he would not object to the Sunday seeing it. Indeed he would rather like the Sunday to see it, on his next visit. Already it was in nearly complete order, for he had shown a singular, callous disregard for the progress of the rest of the house: against which surprising display of selfishness both Maggie and Mrs Nixon had glumly protested. The truth was that he was entirely obsessed by his room; it had disabled his conscience.

When he had oscillated on his heels and toes for a few moments with his gaze on the table, he faced about, and stared in a sort of vacant beatitude at the bookshelves to the left hand; those to the right hand were as yet empty. Twilight was deepening.

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FIVE.

He heard his father's heavy and clumsy footstep on the landing. The old man seemed to wander uncertainly a little, and then he pushed open Edwin's door with a brusque movement and entered the room. The two exchanged a look. They seldom addressed each other, save for an immediate practical purpose, and they did not address each other now. But Darius ejaculated "Um!" as he glanced around. They had no intimacy. Darius never showed any interest in his son as an independent human being with a developing personality, though he might have felt such an interest; and Edwin was never conscious of a desire to share any of his ideas or ideals with his father, whom he was content to accept as a creature of inscrutable motives. Now, he resented his father's incursion. He considered his room as his castle, whereof his rightful exclusive dominion ran as far as the door-mat; and to placate his pride Darius should have indicated by some gesture or word that he admitted being a visitor on sufferance. It was nothing to Edwin that Darius owned the room and nearly everything in it. He was generally nervous in his father's presence, and his submissiveness only hid a spiritual independence that was not less fierce for being restrained. He thought Darius a gross fleshly organism, as he indeed was, and he privately objected to many paternal mannerisms, of eating, drinking, breathing, eructation, speech, deportment, and garb. Further, he had noted, and felt, the increasing moroseness of his father's demeanour. He could remember a period when Darius had moods of grim gaiety, displaying rough humour; these moods had long ceased to occur.

"So this is how ye've fixed yerself up!" Darius observed.

"Yes," Edwin smiled, not moving from the hearthrug, and not ceasing to oscillate on heels and toes.

"Well, I'll say this. Ye've got a goodish notion of looking after yerself. When ye can spare a few minutes to do a bit downstairs--" This sentence was sarcastic and required no finishing.

"I was just coming," said Edwin. And to himself, "What on earth does he want here, making his noises?"

With youthful lack of imagination and of sympathy, he quite failed to perceive the patent fact that his father had been drawn into the room by the very same instinct which had caused Edwin to stand on the hearthrug in an idle bliss of contemplation. It did not cross his mind that his father too was during those days going through wondrous mental experiences, that his father too had begun a new life, that his father too was intensely proud of the house and found pleasure in merely looking at it, and looking at it again, and at every corner of it.

A glint of gold attracted the eye of Darius to the second shelf of the left-hand bookcase, and he went towards it with the arrogance of an autocrat whose authority recognises no limit. Fourteen fine calf-backed volumes stood on that shelf in a row; twelve of them were uniform, the other two odd. These books were taller and more distinguished than any of their neighbours. Their sole possible rivals were half a dozen garishly bound Middle School prizes, machine-tooled, and to be mistaken for treasures only at a distance of several yards.

Edwin trembled, and loathed himself for trembling. He walked to the window.

"What be these?" Darius inquired.

"Oh! Some books I've been picking up."

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SIX.

That same morning Edwin had been to the Saint Luke's Covered Market to buy some apples for Maggie, who had not yet perfected the organisation necessary to a house-mistress who does not live within half a minute of a large central source of supplies. And, to his astonishment, he had observed that one of the interior shops was occupied by a second-hand bookseller with an address at Hanbridge. He had never noticed the shop before, or, if he had noticed it, he had despised it. But the chat with Tom Orgreave had awakened in him the alertness of a hunter. The shop was not formally open--Wednesday's market being only half a market. The shopkeeper, however, was busy within. Edwin loitered. Behind the piles of negligible sermons, pietisms, keepsakes, schoolbooks, and `Aristotles' (tied up in red twine, these last), he could descry, in the farther gloom, actual folios and quartos. It was like seeing the gleam of nuggets on the familiar slopes of Mow Cop, which is the Five Towns' mountain. The proprietor, an extraordinarily grimy man, invited him to examine. He could not refuse. He found Byron's "Childe Harold" in one volume and "Don Juan" in another, both royal octavo editions, slightly stained, but bound in full calf. He bought them. He knew that to keep his resolutions he must read a lot of poetry. Then he saw Voltaire's prose tales in four volumes, in French,--an enchanting Didot edition, with ink as black as Hades and paper as white as snow; also bound in full calf. He bought them. And then the proprietor showed him, in eight similar volumes, Voltaire's "Dictionnaire Philosophique." He did not want it; but it matched the tales and it was impressive to the eye. And so he bought the other eight volumes. The total cost was seventeen shillings. He was intoxicated and he was frightened. What a nucleus for a collection of real books, of treasures! Those volumes would do no shame even to Tom Orgreave's bookcase. And they had been lying in the Covered Market, of all places in the universe... Blind! How blind he had been to the possibilities of existence! Laden with a bag of apples in one hand and a heavy parcel of books in the other, he had had to go up to dinner in the car. It was no matter; he possessed riches. The car stopped specially for him at the portals of the new house. He had introduced the books into the new house surreptitiously, because he was in fear, despite his acute joy. He had pushed the parcel under the bed. After tea, he had passed half an hour in gazing at the volumes, as at precious contraband. Then he had ranged them on the shelf, and had gazed at them for perhaps another quarter of an hour. And now his father, with the infallible nose of fathers for that which is no concern of theirs, had lighted upon them and was peering into them, and fingering them with his careless, brutal hands,--hands that could not differentiate between a ready reckoner and a treasure. As the light failed, he brought one of them and then another to the window.

"Um!" he muttered. "Voltaire!"

"Um! Byron!"

And: "How much did they ask ye for these?"

"Fifteen shillings," said Edwin, in a low voice.

"Here! Take it!" said his father, relinquishing a volume to him. He spoke in a queer, hard voice; and instantly left the room. Edwin followed him shortly, and assisted Maggie to hang pictures in that wilderness, the drawing-room. Supper was eaten in silence; and Maggie looked askance from her father to her brother, both of whom had a strained demeanour.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

THE INSULT.

The cold bath, the early excursion into the oblong of meadow that was beginning to be a garden, the brisk stimulating walk down Trafalgar Road to business,--all these novel experiences, which for a year Edwin had been anticipating with joyous eagerness as bliss final and sure, had lost their savour on the following morning. He had been ingenuous enough to believe that he would be happy in the new house--that the new house somehow meant the rebirth of himself and his family. Strange delusion! The bath-splashings and the other things gave him no pleasure, because he was saying to himself all the time, "There's going to be a row this morning. There's going to be a regular shindy this morning!" Yet he was accustomed to his father's scenes... Not a word at breakfast, for which indeed Darius was very late. But a thick cloud over the breakfast-table! Maggie showed that she felt the cloud. So did even Mrs Nixon. The niece alone, unskilled in the science of meteorology, did not notice it, and was pertly bright. Edwin departed before his father, hurrying. He knew that his father, starting from the luxurious books, would ask him brutally what he meant by daring to draw out his share from the Club without mentioning the affair, and particularly without confiding to his safe custody the whole sum withdrawn. He knew that his father would persist in regarding the fifty pounds as sacred, as the ark of the covenant, and on the basis of the alleged outrage would build one of those cold furies that seemed to give him so perverse a delight. On the other hand, despite his father's peculiar intonation of the names of Edwin's authors--Voltaire and Byron--he did not fear to be upbraided for possessing himself of loose and poisonous literature. It was a point to his father's credit that he never attempted any kind of censorship. Edwin never knew whether this attitude was the result of indifference or due to a grim sporting instinct.

There was no sign of trouble in the shop until noon. Darius was very busy superintending the transformation of the former living-rooms upstairs into supplementary workshops, and also the jobbing builder was at work according to the plans of Osmond Orgreave. But at five minutes past twelve--just before Stifford went out to his dinner--Darius entered the ebonised cubicle, and said curtly to Edwin, who was writing there--

"Show me your book."

This demand surprised Edwin. `His' book was the shop-sales book. He was responsible for it, and for the petty cash-book, and for the shop till. His father's private cash-book was utterly unknown to him, and he had no trustworthy idea of the financial totality of the business; but the management of the shop till gave him the air of being in his father's confidence accustomed him to the discipline of anxiety, and also somewhat flattered him.

He produced the book. The last complete page had not been added up.

"Add this," said his father.

Darius himself added up the few lines on the incomplete page.

"Stiff;" he shouted, "bring me the sales-slip."

The amounts of sales conducted by Stifford himself were written on a slip of paper from which Edwin transferred the items at frequent intervals to the book.

"Go to yer dinner," said Darius to Stifford, when he appeared at the door of the cubicle with the slip.

"It's not quite time yet, sir."

"Go to yer dinner, I tell ye."

Stifford had three-quarters of an hour for his dinner.

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TWO.

Darius combined the slip with the book and made a total.

"Petty cash," he muttered shortly.

Edwin produced the petty cash-book, a volume of very trifling importance.

"Now bring me the till."

Edwin went out of the cubicle and brought the till, which was a large and battered japanned cash-box with a lid in two independent parts, from its well-concealed drawer behind the fancy-counter. Darius counted the coins in it and made calculations on blotting-paper, breathing stertorously all the time.

"What on earth are you trying to get at?" Edwin asked, with innocent familiarity. He thought that the Club-share crisis had been postponed by one of his father's swift strange caprices.

Darius turned on him glaring: "I'm trying to get at where ye got the brass from to buy them there books as I saw last night. Where _did_ ye get it from? There's nowt wrong here, unless ye're a mighty lot cleverer than I take ye for. Where did ye get it from? Ye don't mean to tell me as ye saved it up!"

Edwin had had some shocks in his life. This was the greatest. He could feel his cheeks and his hands growing dully hot, and his eyes smarting; and he was suddenly animated by an almost murderous hatred and an inexpressible disgust for his father, who in the grossness of his perceptions and his notions had imagined his son to be a thief. "Loathsome beast!" he thought savagely.

"I'm waiting," said his father.

"I've drawn my Club money," said Edwin.

For an instant the old man was at a loss; then he understood. He had entirely forgotten the maturing of the Club share, and assuredly he had not dreamed that Edwin would accept and secrete so vast a sum as fifty pounds without uttering a word. Darius had made a mistake, and a bad one; but in those days fathers were never wrong; above all they never apologised. In Edwin's wicked act of concealment Darius could choose new and effective ground, and he did so.

"And what dost mean by doing that and saying nowt? Sneaking--"

"What do you mean by calling me a thief?" Edwin and Darius were equally startled by this speech. Edwin knew not what had come over him, and Darius, never having been addressed in such a dangerous tone by his son, was at a loss.

"I never called ye a thief."

"Yes, you did! Yes, you did!" Edwin nearly shouted now. "You starve me for money, until I haven't got sixpence to bless myself with. You couldn't get a man to do what I do for twice what you pay me. And then you call me a thief. And then you jump down my throat because I spend a bit of money of my own." He snorted. He knew that he was quite mad, but there was a strange drunken pleasure in this madness.

"Hold yer tongue, lad!" said Darius, as stiffly as he could. But Darius, having been unprepared, was intimidated. Darius vaguely comprehended that a new and disturbing factor had come into his life. "Make a less row!" he went on more strongly. "D'ye want all th' street to hear ye?"

"I won't make a less row. You make as much noise as you want, and I'll make as much noise as I want!" Edwin cried louder and louder. And then in bitter scorn, "Thief, indeed!"

"I never called ye a--"

"Let me come out!" Edwin shouted. They were very close together. Darius saw that his son's face was all drawn. Edwin snatched his hat off its hook, pushed violently past his father and, sticking his hands deep in his pockets, strode into the street.

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THREE.

In four minutes he was hammering on the front door of the new house. Maggie opened, in alarm. Edwin did not see how alarmed she was by his appearance.

"What--"

"Father thinks I've been stealing his damned money!" Edwin snapped, in a breaking voice. The statement was not quite accurate, but it suited his boiling anger to put it in the present tense instead of in the past. He hesitated an instant in the hall, throwing a look behind at Maggie, who stood entranced with her hand on the latch of the open door. Then he bounded upstairs, and shut himself in his room with a tremendous bang that shook the house. He wanted to cry, but he would not.

Nobody disturbed him till about two o'clock, when Maggie knocked at the door, and opened it, without entering.

"Edwin, I've kept your dinner hot."

"No, thanks." He was standing with his legs wide apart on the hearth rug.

"Father's had his dinner and gone."

"No, thanks."

She closed the door again.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

THE SEQUEL.

"I say, Edwin," Maggie called through the door.

"Well, come in, come in," he replied gruffly. And as he spoke he sped from the window, where he was drumming on the pane, to the hearthrug, so that he should have the air of not having moved since Maggie's previous visit. He knew not why he made this manoeuvre, unless it was that he thought vaguely that Maggie's impression of the seriousness of the crisis might thereby be intensified.

She stood in the doorway, evidently placatory and sympathetic, and behind her stood Mrs Nixon, in a condition of great mental turmoil.

"I think you'd better come and have your tea," said Maggie firmly, and yet gently. She was soft and stout, and incapable of asserting herself with dignity; but she was his elder, and there were moments when an unusual, scarce-perceptible quality in her voice would demand from him a particular attention.

He shook his head, and looked sternly at his watch, in the manner of one who could be adamant. He was astonished to see that the hour was a quarter past six.

"Where is he?" he asked.

"Father? He's had his tea and gone back to the shop. Come along."

"I must wash myself first," said Edwin gloomily. He did not wish to yield, but he was undeniably very hungry indeed.

Mrs Nixon could not leave him alone at tea, worrying him with offers of specialities to tempt him. He wondered who had told the old thing about the affair. Then he reflected that she had probably heard his outburst when he entered the house. Possibly the pert, nice niece also had heard it. Maggie remained sewing at the bow-window of the dining-room while he ate a plenteous tea.

"Father said I could tell you that you could pay yourself an extra half-crown a week wages from next Saturday," said Maggie suddenly, when she saw he had finished. It was always Edwin who paid wages in the Clayhanger establishment.

He was extremely startled by this news, with all that it implied of surrender and of pacific intentions. But he endeavoured to hide what he felt, and only snorted.

"He's been talking, then? What did he say?"

"Oh! Not much! He told me I could tell you if I liked."

"It would have looked better of him, if he'd told me himself," said Edwin, determined to be ruthless. Maggie offered no response.

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TWO.

After about a quarter of an hour he went into the garden, and kicked stones in front of him. He could not classify his thoughts. He considered himself to be perfectly tranquillised now, but he was mistaken. As he idled in the beautiful August twilight near the garden-front of the house, catching faintly the conversation of Mrs Nixon and her niece as it floated through the open window of the kitchen, round the corner, together with quiet soothing sounds of washing-up, he heard a sudden noise in the garden-porch, and turned swiftly. His father stood there. Both of them were off guard. Their eyes met.

"Had your tea?" Darius asked, in an unnatural tone.

"Yes," said Edwin.

Darius, having saved his face, hurried into the house, and Edwin moved down the garden, with heart sensibly beating. The encounter renewed his agitation.

And at the corner of the garden, over the hedge, which had been repaired, Janet entrapped him. She seemed to have sprung out of the ground. He could not avoid greeting her, and in order to do so he had to dominate himself by force. She was in white. She appeared always to wear white on fine summer days. Her smile was exquisitely benignant.

"So you're installed?" she began.

They talked of the removal, she asking questions and commenting, and he giving brief replies.

"I'm all alone to-night," she said, in a pause, "except for Alicia. Father and mother and the boys are gone to a fete at Longshaw."

"And Miss Lessways?" he inquired self-consciously.

"Oh! She's gone," said Janet. "She's gone back to London. Went yesterday."

"Rather sudden, isn't it?"

"Well, she had to go."

"Does she live in London?" Edwin asked, with an air of indifference.

"She does just now."

"I only ask because I thought from something she said she came from Turnhill way."

"Her people do," said Janet. "Yes, you may say she's a Turnhill girl."

"She seems very fond of poetry," said Edwin.

"You've noticed it!" Janet's face illuminated the dark. "You should hear her recite!"

"Recites, does she?"

"You'd have heard her that night you were here. But when she knew you were coming, she made us all promise not to ask her."

"Really!" said Edwin. "But why? She didn't know me. She'd never seen me."

"Oh! She might have just seen you in the street. In fact I believe she had. But that wasn't the reason," Janet laughed. "It was just that you were a stranger. She's very sensitive, you know."

"Ye-es," he admitted.

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THREE.

He took leave of Janet, somehow, and went for a walk up to Toft End, where the wind blows. His thoughts were more complex than ever in the darkness. So she had made them all promise not to ask her to recite while he was at the Orgreaves'! She had seen him, previous to that, in the street, and had obviously discussed him with Janet... And then, at nearly midnight, she had followed him to the new house! And on the day of the Centenary she had manoeuvred to let Janet and Mr Orgreave go in front... He did not like her. She was too changeable, too dark, and too light... But it was exciting. It was flattering. He saw again and again her gesture as she bent to Mr Shushions; and the straightening of her spine as she left the garden-porch on the night of his visit to the Orgreaves... Yet he did not like her. Her sudden departure, however, was a disappointment; it was certainly too abrupt... Probably very characteristic of her... Strange day! He had been suspected of theft. He had stood up to his father. He had remained away from the shop. And his father's only retort was to give him a rise of half a crown a week!

"The old man must have had a bit of a shock!" he said to himself, grimly vain. "I lay I don't hear another word about that fifty pounds."

Yes, amid his profound resentment, there was some ingenuous vanity at the turn which things had taken. And he was particularly content about the rise of half a crown a week, because that relieved him from the most difficult of all the resolutions the carrying out of which was to mark the beginning of the new life. It settled the financial question, for the present at any rate. It was not enough, but it was a great deal-- from his father. He was ashamed that he could not keep his righteous resentment pure from this gross satisfaction at an increase of income. The fineness of his nature was thereby hurt. But the gross satisfaction would well up in his mind.

And in the night, with the breeze on his cheek, and the lamps of the Five Towns curving out below him, he was not unhappy, despite what he had suffered and was still suffering. He had a tingling consciousness of being unusually alive.

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FOUR.

Later, in his bedroom, shut in, and safe and independent, with the new blind drawn, and the gas fizzing in its opaline globe, he tried to read "Don Juan." He could not. He was incapable of fixity of mind. He could not follow the sense of a single stanza. Images of his father and of Hilda Lessways mingled with reveries of the insult he had received and the triumph he had won, and all the confused wonder of the day and evening engaged his thoughts. He dwelt lovingly on the supreme disappointment of his career. He fancied what he would have been doing, and where he would have been then, if his appalling father had not made it impossible for him to be an architect. He pitied himself. But he saw the material of happiness ahead, in the faithful execution of his resolves for self-perfecting. And Hilda had flattered him. Hilda had given him a new conception of himself... A tiny idea arose in his brain that there was perhaps some slight excuse for his father's suspicion of him. After all, he had been secretive. He trampled on that idea, and it arose again.

He slept very heavily, and woke with a headache. A week elapsed before his agitation entirely disappeared, and hence before he could realise how extreme that agitation had been. He was ashamed of having so madly and wildly abandoned himself to passion.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE.

Time passed, like a ship across a distant horizon, which moves but which does not seem to move. One Monday evening Edwin said that he was going round to Lane End House. He had been saying so for weeks, and hesitating. He thoroughly enjoyed going to Lane End House; there was no reason why he should not go frequently and regularly, and there were several reasons why he should. Yet his visitings were capricious because his nature was irresolute. That night he went, sticking a hat carelessly on his head, and his hands deep into his pockets. Down the slope of Trafalgar Road, in the biting November mist, between the two rows of gas-lamps that flickered feebly into the pale gloom, came a long straggling band of men who also, to compensate for the absence of overcoats, stuck hands deep into pockets, and strode quickly. With reluctance they divided for the passage of the steam-car, and closed growling together again on its rear. The potters were on strike, and a Bursley contingent was returning in embittered silence from a mass meeting at Hanbridge. When the sound of the steam-car subsided, as the car dipped over the hill-top on its descent towards Hanbridge, nothing could be heard but the tramp-tramp of the procession on the road.

Edwin hurried down the side street, and in a moment rang at the front door of the Orgreaves'. He nodded familiarly to the servant who opened, stepped on to the mat, and began contorting his legs in order to wipe the edge of his boot-soles.

"Quite a stranger, sir!" said Martha, bridling, and respectfully aware of her attractiveness for this friend of the house.

"Yes," he laughed. "Anybody in?"

"Well, sir, I'm afraid Miss Janet and Miss Alicia are out."

"And Mr Tom?"

"Mr Tom's out, sir. He pretty nearly always is now, sir." The fact was that Tom was engaged to be married, and the servant indicated, by a scarcely perceptible motion of the chin, that fiances were and ever would be all the same. "And Mr John and Mr James are out too, sir." They also were usually out. They were both assisting their father in business, and sought relief from his gigantic conception of a day's work by evening diversions at Hanbridge. These two former noisy Liberals had joined the Hanbridge Conservative Club because it was a club, and had a billiard-table that could only be equalled at the Five Towns Hotel at Knype.

"And Mr Orgreave?"

"He's working upstairs, sir. Mrs Orgreave's got her asthma, and so he's working upstairs."

"Well, tell them I've called." Edwin turned to depart.

"I'm sure Mr Orgreave would like to know you're here, sir," said the maid firmly. "If you'll just step into the breakfast-room." That maid did as she chose with visitors for whom she had a fancy.

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TWO.

She conducted him to the so-called breakfast-room and shut the door on him. It was a small chamber behind the drawing-room, and shabbier than the drawing-room. In earlier days the children had used it for their lessons and hobbies. And now it was used as a sitting-room when mere cosiness was demanded by a decimated family. Edwin stooped down and mended the fire. Then he went to the wall and examined a framed water-colour of the old Sytch Pottery, which was signed with his initials. He had done it, aided by a photograph, and by Johnnie Orgreave in details of perspective, and by dint of preprandial frequentings of the Sytch, as a gift for Mrs Orgreave. It always seemed to him to be rather good.

Then he bent to examine bookshelves. Like the hall, the drawing-room, and the dining-room, this apartment too was plenteously full of everything, and littered over with the apparatus of various personalities. Only from habit did Edwin glance at the books. He knew their backs by heart. And books in quantity no longer intimidated him. Despite his grave defects as a keeper of resolves, despite his paltry trick of picking up a newspaper or periodical and reading it all through, out of sheer vacillation and mental sloth, before starting serious perusals, despite the human disinclination which he had to bracing himself, and keeping up the tension, in a manner necessary for the reading of long and difficult works, and despite sundry ignominious backslidings into original sluggishness--still he had accomplished certain literary adventures. He could not enjoy "Don Juan." Expecting from it a voluptuous and daring grandeur, he had found in it nothing whatever that even roughly fitted into his idea of what poetry was. But he had had a passion for "Childe Harold," many stanzas of which thrilled him again and again, bringing back to his mind what Hilda Lessways had said about poetry. And further, he had a passion for Voltaire. In Voltaire, also, he had been deceived, as in Byron. He had expected something violent, arid, closely argumentative; and he found gaiety, grace, and really the funniest jokes. He could read "Candide" almost without a dictionary, and he had intense pride in doing so, and for some time afterwards "Candide" and "La Princesse de Babylone," and a few similar witty trifles, were the greatest stories in the world for him. Only a faint reserve in Tom Orgreave's responsive enthusiasm made him cautiously reflect.

He could never be intimate with Tom, because Tom somehow never came out from behind his spectacles. But he had learnt much from him, and in especial a familiarity with the less difficult of Bach's preludes and fugues, which Tom loved to play. Edwin knew not even the notes of music, and he was not sure that Bach gave him pleasure. Bach affected him strangely. He would ask for Bach out of a continually renewed curiosity, so that he could examine once more and yet again the sensations which the music produced; and the habit grew. As regards the fugues, there could be no doubt that, the fugue begun, a desire was thereby set up in him for the resolution of the confusing problem created in the first few bars, and that he waited, with a pleasant and yet a trying anxiety, for the indications of that resolution, and that the final reassuring and utterly tranquillising chords gave him deep joy. When he innocently said that he was `glad when the end came of a fugue,' all the Orgreaves laughed heartily, but after laughing, Tom said that he knew what Edwin meant and quite agreed.

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THREE.

It was while he was glancing along the untidy and crowded shelves with sophisticated eye that the door brusquely opened. He looked up mildly, expecting a face familiar, and saw one that startled him, and heard a voice that aroused disconcerting vibrations in himself. It was Hilda Lessways. She had in her hand a copy of the "Signal." Over fifteen months had gone since their last meeting, but not since he had last thought of her. Her features seemed strange. His memory of them had not been reliable. He had formed an image of her in his mind, and had often looked at it, and he now saw that it did not correspond with the reality. The souvenir of their brief intimacy swept back upon him. Incredible that she should be there, in front of him; and yet there she was! More than once, after reflecting on her, he had laughed, and said lightly to himself: "Well, the chances are I shall never see _her_ again! Funny girl!" But the recollection of her gesture with Mr Shushions prevented him from dismissing her out of his head with quite that lightness...

"I'm ordered to tell you that Mr Orgreave will be down in a few minutes," she said.

"_Hello!_" he exclaimed. "I'd no idea you were in Bursley!"

"Came to-day!" she replied.

"How odd," he thought, "that I should call like this on the very day she comes!" But he pushed away that instinctive thought with the rational thought that such a coincidence could not be regarded as in any way significant.

They shook hands in the middle of the room, and she pressed his hand, while looking downwards with a smile. And his mind was suddenly filled with the idea that during all those months she had been existing somewhere, under the eye of some one, intimate with some one, and constantly conducting herself with a familiar freedom that doubtless she would not use to him. And so she was invested, for him, with mysteriousness. His interest in her was renewed in a moment, and in a form much more acute than its first form. Moreover, she presented herself to his judgement in a different aspect. He could scarcely comprehend how he had ever deemed her habitual expression to be forbidding. In fact, he could persuade himself now that she was beautiful, and even nobly beautiful. From one extreme he flew to the other. She sat down on an old sofa; he remained standing. And in the midst of a little conversation about Mrs Orgreave's indisposition, and the absence of the members of the family (she said she had refused an invitation to go with Janet and Alicia to Hillport), she broke the thread, and remarked--

"You would have known I was coming if you'd been calling here recently." She pushed her feet near the fender, and gazed into the fire.

"Ah! But you see I haven't been calling recently."

She raised her eyes to his. "I suppose you've never thought about me once since I left!" she fired at him. An audacious and discomposing girl!

"Oh yes, I have," he said weakly. What could you reply to such speeches? Nevertheless he was flattered.

"Really? But you've never inquired about me."

"Yes, I have."

"Only once."

"How do you know?"

"I asked Janet."

"Damn her!" he said to himself, but pleased with her. And aloud, in a tone suddenly firm, "That's nothing to go by."

"What isn't?"

"The number of _times_ I've inquired." He was blushing.

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FOUR.

In the smallness of the room, sitting as it were at his feet on the sofa, surrounded and encaged by a hundred domestic objects and by the glow of the fire and the radiance of the gas, she certainly did seem to Edwin to be an organism exceedingly mysterious. He could follow with his eye every fold of her black dress, he could trace the waving of her hair, and watch the play of light in her eyes. He might have physically hurt her, he might have killed her, she was beneath his hand--and yet she was most bafflingly withdrawn, and the essence of her could not be touched nor got at. Why did she challenge him by her singular attitude? Why was she always saying such queer things to him? No other girl (he thought, in the simplicity of his inexperience) would ever talk as she talked. He wanted to test her by being rude to her. "Damn her!" he said to himself again. "Supposing I took hold of her and kissed her--I wonder what sort of a face she'd pull then!" (And a moment ago he had been appraising her as nobly beautiful! A moment ago he had been dwelling on the lovely compassion of her gesture with Mr Shushions!) This quality of daring and naughty enterprise had never before shown itself in Edwin, and he was surprised to discover in himself such impulses. But then the girl was so provocative. And somehow the sight of the girl delivered him from an excessive fear of consequences. He said to himself, "I'll do something or I'll say something, before I leave her to-night, just to show her!" He screwed up his resolution to the point of registering a private oath that he would indeed do or say something. Without a solemn oath he could not rely upon his valour. He knew that whatever he said or did in the nature of a bold advance would be accomplished clumsily. He knew that it would be unpleasant. He knew that inaction suited much better his instinct for tranquillity. No matter! All that was naught. She had challenged, and he had to respond. Besides, she allured... And, after her scene with him in the porch of the new house, had he not the right? ... A girl who had behaved as she did that night cannot effectively contradict herself!

"I was just reading about this strike," she said, rustling the newspaper.

"You've soon got into local politics."

"Well," she said, "I saw a lot of the men as we were driving from the station. I should think I saw two thousand of them. So of course I was interested. I made Mr Orgreave tell me all about it. Will they win?"

"It depends on the weather." He smiled.

She remained silent, and grave. "I see!" she said, leaning her chin on her hand. At her tone he ceased smiling. She said "I see," and she actually had seen.

"You see," he repeated. "If it was June instead of November! But then it isn't June. Wages are settled every year in November. So if there is to be a strike it can only begin in November."

"But didn't the men ask for the time of year to be changed?"

"Yes," he said. "But you don't suppose the masters were going to agree to that, do you?" He sneered masculinely.

"Why not?"

"Because it gives them such a pull."

"What a shame!" Hilda exclaimed passionately. "And what a shame it is that the masters want to make the wages depend on selling prices! Can't they see that selling prices ought to depend on wages?"

Edwin said nothing. She had knocked suddenly out of his head all ideas of flirting, and he was trying to reassemble them.

"I suppose you're like all the rest?" she questioned gloomily.

"How like all the rest?"

"Against the men. Mr Orgreave is, and he says your father is very strongly against them."

"Look here," said Edwin, with an air of resentment as to which he himself could not have decided whether it was assumed or genuine, "what earthly right have you to suppose that I'm like all the rest?"

"I'm very sorry," she surrendered. "I knew all the time you weren't." With her face still bent downwards, she looked up at him, smiling sadly, smiling roguishly.

"Father's against them," he proceeded, somewhat deflated. And he thought of all his father's violent invective, and of Maggie's bland acceptance of the assumption that workmen on strike were rascals--how different the excellent simple Maggie from this feverish creature on the sofa! "Father's against them, and most people are, because they broke the last arbitration award. But I'm not my father. If you ask me, I'll tell you what I think--workmen on strike are always in the right; at bottom I mean. You've only got to look at them in a crowd together. They don't starve themselves for fun."

He was not sure if he was convinced of the truth of these statements; but she drew them out of him by her strange power. And when he had uttered them, they appeared fine to him.

"What does your father say to that?"

"Oh!" said Edwin uneasily. "Him--and me--we don't argue about these things."

"Why not?"

"Well, we don't."

"You aren't ashamed of your own opinions, are you?" she demanded, with a hint in her voice that she was ready to be scornful.

"You know all the time I'm not." He repeated the phrase of her previous confession with a certain acrimonious emphasis. "Don't you?" he added curtly.

She remained silent.

"Don't you?" he said more loudly. And as she offered no reply, he went on, marvelling at what was coming out of his mouth. "I'll tell you what I am ashamed of. I'm ashamed of seeing my father lose his temper. So you know!"

She said--

"I never met anybody like you before. No, never!"

At this he really was astounded, and most exquisitely flattered.

"I might say the same of you," he replied, sticking his chin out.

"Oh no!" she said. "I'm nothing."

The fact was that he could not foretell their conversation even ten seconds in advance. It was full of the completely unexpected. He thought to himself, "You never know what a girl like that will say next." But what would _he_ say next?

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FIVE.

They were interrupted by Osmond Orgreave, with his, "Well, Edwin," jolly, welcoming, and yet slightly quizzical. Edwin could not look him in the face without feeling self-conscious. Nor dared he glance at Hilda to see what her demeanour was like under the good-natured scrutiny of her friend's father.

"We thought you'd forgotten us," said Mr Orgreave. "But that's always the way with neighbours." He turned to Hilda. "It's true," he continued, jerking his head at Edwin. "He scarcely ever comes to see us, except when you're here."

"Steady on!" Edwin murmured. "Steady on, Mr Orgreave!" And hastily he asked a question about Mrs Orgreave's asthma; and from that the conversation passed to the doings of the various absent members of the family.

"You've been working, as usual, I suppose," said Edwin.

"Working!" laughed Mr Orgreave. "I've done what I could, with Hilda there! Instead of going up to Hillport with Janet, she would stop here and chatter about strikes."

Hilda smiled at him benevolently as at one to whom she permitted everything.

"Mr Clayhanger agrees with me," she said.

"Oh! You needn't tell me!" protested Mr Orgreave. "I could see you were as thick as thieves over it." He looked at Edwin. "Has she told you she wants to go over a printing works?"

"No," said Edwin. "But I shall be very pleased to show her over ours, any time."

She made no observation.

"Look here," said Edwin suddenly, "I must be off. I only slipped in for a minute, really." He did not know why he said this, for his greatest wish was to probe more deeply into the tantalising psychology of Hilda Lessways. His tongue, however, had said it, and his tongue reiterated it when Mr Orgreave urged that Janet and Alicia would be back soon and that food would then be partaken of. He would not stay. Desiring to stay, he would not. He wished to be alone, to think. Clearly Hilda had been talking about him to Mr Orgreave, and to Janet. Did she discuss him and his affairs with everybody?

Nor would he, in response to Mr Orgreave's suggestion, promise definitely to call again on the next evening. He said he would try. Hilda took leave of him nonchalantly. He departed.

And as he made the half-circuit of the misty lawn, on his way to the gates, he muttered in his heart, where even he himself could scarcely hear: "I swore I'd do something, and I haven't. Well, of course, when she talked seriously like that, what could I do?" But he was disgusted with himself and ashamed of his namby-pambiness.

He strolled thoughtfully up Oak Street, and down Trafalgar Road; and when he was near home, another wayfarer saw him face right about and go up Trafalgar Road and disappear at the corner of Oak Street.

The Orgreave servant was surprised to see him at the front door again when she answered a discreet ring.

"I wish you'd tell Miss Lessways I want to speak to her a moment, will you?"

"Miss Lessways?"

"Yes." What an adventure!

"Certainly, sir. Will you come in?" She shut the door.

"Ask her to come here," he said, smiling with deliberate confidential persuasiveness. She nodded, with a brighter smile.

The servant vanished, and Hilda came. She was as red as fire. He began hurriedly.

"When will you come to look over our works? To-morrow? I should like you to come." He used a tone that said: "Now don't let's have any nonsense! You know you want to come."

She frowned frankly. There they were in the hall, like a couple of conspirators, but she was frowning; she would not meet him half-way. He wished he had not permitted himself this caprice. What importance had a private oath? He felt ridiculous.

"What time?" she demanded, and in an instant transformed his disgust into delight.

"Any time." His heart was beating with expectation.

"Oh no! You must fix the time."

"Well, after tea. Say between half-past six and a quarter to seven. That do?"

She nodded.

"Good," he murmured. "That's all! Thanks. Good-night!"

He hastened away, with a delicate photograph of the palm of her hand printed in minute sensations on the palm of his.

"I did it, anyhow!" he muttered loudly, in his heart. At any rate he was not shamed. At any rate he was a man. The man's face was burning, and the damp noxious chill of the night only caressed him agreeably.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

CURIOSITY.

He was afraid that, from some obscure motive of propriety or self-protection, she would bring Janet with her, or perhaps Alicia. On the other hand, he was afraid that she would come alone. That she should come alone seemed to him, in spite of his reason, too brazen. Moreover, if she came alone would he be equal to the situation? Would he be able to carry the thing off in a manner adequate? He lacked confidence. He desired the moment of her arrival, and yet he feared it. His heart and his brain were all confused together in a turmoil of emotion which he could not analyse nor define.

He was in love. Love had caught him, and had affected his vision so that he no longer saw any phenomenon as it actually was; neither himself, nor Hilda, nor the circumstances which were uniting them. He could not follow a train of thought. He could not remain of one opinion nor in one mind. Within himself he was perpetually discussing Hilda, and her attitude. She was marvellous! But was she? She admired him! But did she? She had shown cunning! But was it not simplicity? He did not even feel sure whether he liked her. He tried to remember what she looked like, and he positively could not. The one matter upon which he could be sure was that his curiosity was hotly engaged. If he had had to state the case in words to another he would not have gone further than the word `curiosity.' He had no notion that he was in love. He did not know what love was; he had not had sufficient opportunity of learning. Nevertheless the processes of love were at work within him. Silently and magically, by the force of desire and of pride, the refracting glass was being specially ground which would enable him, which would compel him, to see an ideal Hilda when he gazed at the real Hilda. He would not see the real Hilda any more unless some cataclysm should shatter the glass. And he might be likened to a prisoner on whom the gate of freedom is shut for ever, or to a stricken sufferer of whom it is known that he can never rise again and go forth into the fields. He was as somebody to whom the irrevocable had happened. And he knew it not. None knew. None guessed. All day he went his ways, striving to conceal the whirring preoccupation of his curiosity (a curiosity which he thought showed a fine masculine dash), and succeeded fairly well. The excellent, simple Maggie alone remarked in secret that he was slightly nervous and unnatural. But even she, with all her excellent simplicity, did not divine his victimhood.

At six o'clock he was back at the shop from his tea. It was a wet, chill night. On the previous evening he had caught cold, and he was beginning to sneeze. He said to himself that Hilda could not be expected to come on such a night. But he expected her. When the shop clock showed half-past six, he glanced at his watch, which also showed half-past six. Now at any instant she might arrive. The shop door opened, and simultaneously his heart ceased to beat. But the person who came in, puffing and snorting, was his father, who stood within the shop while shaking his soaked umbrella over the exterior porch. The draught from the shiny dark street and square struck cold, and Edwin responsively sneezed; and Darius Clayhanger upbraided him for not having worn his overcoat, and he replied with foolish unconvincingness that he had got a cold, that it was nothing. Darius grunted his way into the cubicle. Edwin remained in busy idleness at the right-hand counter; Stifford was tidying the contents of drawers behind the fancy-counter. And the fizzing gas-burners, inevitable accompaniment of night at the period, kept watch above. Under the heat of the stove, the damp marks of Darius Clayhanger's entrance disappeared more quickly than the minutes ran. It grew almost impossible for Edwin to pass the time. At moments when his father was not stirring in the cubicle, and Stifford happened to be in repose, he could hear the ticking of the clock, which he could not remember ever having heard before, except when he mounted the steps to wind it.

At a quarter to seven he said to himself that he gave up hope, while pretending that he never had hoped, and that Hilda's presence was indifferent to him. If she came not that day she would probably come some other day. What could it matter? He was very unhappy. He said to himself that he should have a long night's reading, but the prospect of reading had no savour. He said: "No, I shan't go in to see them to-night, I shall stay in and nurse my cold, and read." This was mere futile bravado, for the impartial spectator in him, though far less clear-sighted and judicial now than formerly, foresaw with certainty that if Hilda did not come he would call at the Orgreaves'. At five minutes to seven he was miserable: he had decided to hope until five minutes to seven. He made it seven in despair. Then there were signs of a figure behind the misty glass of the door. The door opened. It could not be she! Impossible that it should be she! But it was she; she had the air of being a miracle.

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TWO.