Suddenly deciding to walk up to Hillport "for the sake of exercise," he quickened his pace. After a mile and a half, when he had crossed the railway at Shawport and was on the Hillport rise, and the Five Towns had begun to spread out in a map behind him, he noticed that he was perspiring. He very seldom perspired, and therefore he had the conviction that the walk was "doing him good." He felt exhilarated, and moved still faster.
His mood was now changed. The spectacle of Emmie and the soldier had thrown him violently out of resentment into wonder. His indignation was somewhat exhausted, and though he tried again and again to flick it back into full heat and activity, he could not. He kept thinking of the moment in the morning when, standing ready to jump from the dog-cart, his wife had said: "Catch me, both of you," and he recalled vividly the sensation of her acquiescence, her momentary yielding--imperceptible yet unforgettable--as he supported her strongly in his arms; and with this memory was mingled the smell of velvet. Strange that a woman so harsh, selfish and overbearing, could thus contradict her whole character in an instant of surrender! Was she in that gesture confiding to him the deepest secret? ... Rubbish! But now he no longer looked down on her disdainfully. Honesty made him admit that it was puerile to affect disdain of an individuality so powerful and so mysterious. If she was a foe, she was at any rate a dangerous fighter, and not to be played with.
And yet she could be a trifle, a wisp of fragile flesh in his arms!
He saw the beatific face of Emmie against the churchyard gates under the lamp.... Why not humour Hilda? Why not let her plant their home according to her caprice? ... Certainly not! Never would he do it! Why should he? Time after time he angrily rejected the idea. Time after time it returned. What did it matter to Hilda where she lived? And had he not bought their present house solely in order to please her? The first consideration in choosing a home ought to be and must be the consideration of business convenience.... Yet, what did it matter to him where his home was? (He remembered a phrase of Ingpen"s: "I don"t live on that plane.") Could he not adapt himself? He dreamt of very rapid transit between Ladderedge Hall and the works. Motor-cars had just become lawful; but he had never happened to see one, though he had heard of several in the district, or pa.s.sing through. His imagination could not rise so high as a motor-car. That he could ever use or possess one did not even occur to him. He thought only of a fast-trotting horse, and a trap with indiarubber tyres; himself the driver; sometimes Hilda the driver.... An equipage to earn renown in the district. "Clayhanger"s trap,"--"He drives in from Ladderedge in thirty-five minutes. The horse simply won"t walk; doesn"t know how to!"
And so on. He had heard such talk of others. Why should not others hear it of him? ... Then, the pleasure, the mere pleasure--call it sensual or what you like--of granting a caprice to the capricious creature! If a thing afforded her joy, why not give it? ... To see her in the role of mistress of a country-house, delicately horsey, excited about charitable schemes, protecting the poor, working her will upon gardeners and grooms, stamping her foot in the violence of her resolution to have her own way, offering sugar to a horse, nursing a sick dog! Amusing; Agreeable! ... And all that activity of hers a mere dependence of his own! Flattering to his pride! ... He could afford it easily, for he was richer even than his wife supposed. To let the present house ought not to be difficult. To sell it advantageously ought not to be impossible. In this connection, he thought, though not seriously, of Tom Swetman, who had at last got himself engaged to one of those Scandinavian women about whom he had been chaffed for years; Tom would be wanting an abode, and probably a good one.
He was carried away by his own dream. To realise that dream he had only to yield, to nod negligently, to murmur with benevolent tolerance: "All right. Do as you please." He would have nothing to withdraw, for he had uttered no refusal. Not a word had pa.s.sed between them as to Ladderedge Hall since they had quitted it. He had merely said that he did not like it,--"poured cold water on it" as the phrase was. True, his demeanour had plainly intimated that he was still opposed in principle to the entire project of living in the country; but a demeanour need not be formally retracted; it could be negatived without any humiliation....
No, he would never yield, though yielding seemed to open up a pleasant, a delicious prospect. He could not yield. It would be wrong, and it would be dangerous, to yield. Had he not already quite clearly argued out with himself the whole position? And yet why not yield? ... He was afraid as before a temptation.
He re-crossed the railway, and crossed Fowlea Brook, a boundary, back into the borough. The dark path lay parallel with the ca.n.a.l, but below it. He had gone right through Hillport and round Hillport Marsh and returned down the flank of the great ridge that protects the Five Towns on the West. He could not recollect the details of the walk; he only knew that he had done it all, that time and the miles had pa.s.sed with miraculous rapidity, and that his boots were very muddy. A change in the consistency of the mud caused him to look up at the sky, which was clearing and showed patches of faint stars. A frost had set in, despite the rainy prophecy of street-lamps. In a few moments he had climbed the short steep curving slope on to the ca.n.a.l-bridge. He was breathless and very hot.
He stopped and sat on the parapet. In his school-days he had crossed this bridge twice a day on the journey to and from Oldcastle. Many times he had lingered on it. But he had forgotten the little episodes of his schooldays, which seemed now almost to belong to another incarnation. He did, however, recall that as a boy he could not sit on the parapet unless he vaulted up to it. He thought he must have been ridiculously small and boyish. The lights of Bursley, Bleakridge, Hanbridge and Cauldon hung round the eastern horizon in an arc. To the north presided the clock of Bursley Town Hall, and to the south the clock of Cauldon Church; but both were much too far off to be deciphered. Below and around the Church clock the vague fires of Cauldon Bar Ironworks played, and the tremendous respiration of the blast-furnaces filled the evening. Beneath him gleamed the foul water of the ca.n.a.l.... He trembled with the fever that precedes a supreme decision. He trembled as though he was about to decide whether or not he would throw himself into the ca.n.a.l. Should he accept the country-house scheme? Ought he to accept it? The question was not simply that of a place of residence,--it concerned all his life.
He admitted that marriage must be a mutual accommodation. He was, and always had been, ready to accommodate. But Hilda was unjust, monstrously unjust. Of that he was definitely convinced.... Well, perhaps not monstrously unjust, but very unjust. How could he excuse such injustice as hers? He obviously could not excuse it.... On previous occasions he had invented excuses for her conduct, but they were not convincing excuses. They were compromises between his intellectual honesty and his desire for peace. They were, at bottom, sentimentalism.
And then there flashed into his mind, complete, the great discovery of all his career. It was ba.n.a.l; it was commonplace; it was what everyone knew. Yet it was the great discovery of all his career. If Hilda had not been unjust in the a.s.sertion of her own individuality, there could be no merit in yielding to her. To yield to a just claim was not meritorious, though to withstand it would be wicked. He was objecting to injustice as a child objects to rain on a holiday. Injustice was a tremendous actuality! It had to be faced and accepted. (He himself was unjust. At any rate he intellectually conceived that he must be unjust, though honestly he could remember no instance of injustice on his part.) To reconcile oneself to injustice was the master achievement. He had read it; he had been aware of it; but he had never really felt it till that moment on the dark ca.n.a.l-bridge. He was awed, thrilled by the realisation. He longed ardently to put it to the test. He did put it to the test. He yielded on the ca.n.a.l-bridge. And in yielding, it seemed to him that he was victorious.
He thought confidently and joyously:
"I"m not going to be beaten by Hilda! And I"m not going to be beaten by marriage. Dashed if I am! A nice thing if I had to admit that I wasn"t clever enough to be a husband!"
He was happy, but somewhat timorously so. He had the sense to suspect that his discovery would scarcely transform marriage into an everlasting Eden, and that serious trouble would not improbably recur. "Marriage keeps on all the time till you"re dead!" he said to himself. But he profoundly knew that he had advanced a stage, that he had acquired new wisdom and new power, and that no danger in the future could equal the danger that was past.
He thought:
"I know where I am!"
It had taken him years to discover where he was. Why should the discovery occur just then? He could only suppose that the c.u.mulative battering of experience had at length knocked a hole through his thick head, and let saving wisdom in. The length of time necessary for the operation depended upon the thickness of the head. Some heads were impenetrable and their owners came necessarily to disaster. His head was probably of an average thickness.
When he got into Trafalgar Road, at the summit of Bleakridge, he hesitated to enter his own house, on account of the acute social difficulties that awaited him there, and pa.s.sed it like a beggar who is afraid. One by one he went by all the new little streets of cottages with drawing-rooms--Millett Street, Wilc.o.x Street, Paul Street, Oak Street, Hulton Street,--and the two old little streets, already partly changed--Manor Street and Higginbotham Street. Those mysterious newcoming families from nowhere were driving him out--through the agency of his wife! The Orgreaves had gone, and been succeeded by excellent people with whom it was impossible to fraternise. There were rumours that in view of Tom Swetnam"s imminent defection the Swetnam household might be broken up and the home abandoned. The Suttons, now that Beatrice Sutton had left the district, talked seriously of going. Only Dr. Sterling was left on that side of the road, and he stayed because he must. The once exclusive Terraces on the other side were losing their quality. Old Darius Clayhanger had risen out of the ma.s.s, but he was fiercely exceptional. Now the whole ma.s.s seemed to be rising, under the action of some strange leaven, and those few who by intelligence, by manners, or by money counted themselves select were fleeing as from an inundation.
Edwin had not meant to join in the exodus. But he too would join it.
Destiny had seized him. Let him be as democratic in spirit as he would, his fate was to be cut off from the democracy, with which, for the rest, he had very little of speech or thought or emotion in common, but in which, from an implacable sense of justice, he was religiously and unchangeably determined to put his trust.
He braced himself, and, mounting the steps of the porch, felt in his pocket for his latchkey. It was not there. Hilda had taken it and not returned it. She never did return it when she borrowed it, and probably she never would. He had intended to slip quietly into the house, and prepare if possible an astute opening to minimise the difficulty of the scenes which must inevitably occur. For his dignity would need some protection. In the matter of his dignity, he wished that he had not said quite so certainly to Ingpen: "I shan"t take that house."
With every prim formality, Emmie answered his ring. She was wearing the mask and the black frock and the white ap.r.o.n and cap of her vocation.
Not the slightest trace of the beatified woman in the flowered hat under the lamp at the gates of the churchyard! No sign of a heart or of pa.s.sion or of ecstasy! Incredible creatures--they were all incredible!
He thought, nervous:
"I shall meet Hilda in half a second."
George ran into the hall, wearing his new green shade over his eyes.
"Here he is, mother!" cried George. "I say, nunks, Emmie brought up a parcel for you from Uncle Albert, and Auntie Clara. Here it is. It wasn"t addressed outside, so I opened it."
He indicated the hall-table, on which, in a bed of tissue paper and brown paper, lay a dreadful flat ink-stand of blue gla.s.s and bronze, with a card: "Best wishes to Edwin from Albert and Clara."
George and Edwin gazed at each other with understanding.
"Just my luck isn"t it, sonny?" said Edwin. "It"s worse than last year"s."
"You poor dear!" said Hilda, appearing, all smiles and caressing glances. She was in a pale grey dress. "Whatever shall you do with it?
You know you"ll have to put it on view when they come up. Emmie----" to the maid vanishing into the kitchen--"We"ll have supper now."
"Yes," said Edwin to himself, with light but sardonic tolerance. "Yes, my lady. You"re all smiles because you"re bent on getting Ladderedge Hall out of me. But you don"t know what a near shave you"ve had of getting something else."
He was elated. The welcome of his familiar home was beautiful to him.
And the incalculable woman with a single gesture had most unexpectedly annihilated the unpleasant past and its consequences. He could yield upon the grand contention how and when he chose. He had his acquiescence waiting like a delightful surprise for Hilda. As he looked at her lovingly, with all her crimes of injustice thick upon her, he clearly realised that he saw her as no other person saw her, and that because it was so she in her entirety was indispensable to him. And when he tried to argue impartially and aloofly with himself about rights and wrongs, asinine reason was swamped by an entirely irrational and wise joy in the simple fact of the criminal"s existence.
VI
In the early spring of 1897 there was an evening party at the Clayhangers". But it was not called a party; it was not even called a reception. The theory of the affair was that Hilda had "just asked a few people to come in, without any fuss." The inhabitants of the Five Towns had, and still have, an aversion for every sort of formal hospitality, or indeed for any hospitality other than the impulsive and the haphazard. One or two fathers with forceful daughters agitated by newly revealed appet.i.tes in themselves, might hire a board-schoolroom in January, and give a dance at which sharp exercise and hot drinks alone kept bodies warm in the icy atmosphere. Also musical and dramatic societies and games clubs would have annual conversaziones and dances, which however were enterprises of cooperation rather than of hospitality. Beyond these semi-public entertainments there was almost nothing, in the evening, save card-parties and the small regular reunions of old friends who had foregathered on a certain night of the week for whiskey or tea and gossip ever since the beginning of time, and would continue to do so till some coffin or other was ordered. Every prearranged a.s.semblage comprising more than two persons beyond the family was a "function"--a term implying both contempt and respect for ceremonial; and no function could be allowed to occur without an excuse for it,--such as an anniversary. The notion of deliberately cultivating human intercourse for its own sake would have been regarded as an affectation approaching sn.o.bbishness. Hundreds of well-to-do and socially unimpeachable citizens never gave or received an invitation to a meal. The reason of all this was not meanness, for no community outside America has more generous instincts than the Five Towns; it was merely a primitive self-consciousness striving to conceal itself beneath breezy disdain for those more highly developed manners which it read about with industry and joy in the weekly papers, but which it lacked the courage to imitate.
The break-up of the Orgreave household had been a hard blow to the cult of hospitality in Bleakridge. Lane End House in the old days was a creative centre of hospitality; for the force of example, the desire to emulate, and the necessity of paying in kind for what one has permitted oneself to receive will make hosts of those who by their own initiative would never have sent out an invitation. When the Orgreaves vanished, sundry persons in Bleakridge were discouraged,--and particularly Edwin and Hilda, whose musical evenings had never recovered from the effect of the circ.u.mstances of the first one. They entertained only by fits and starts, when Hilda happened to remember that she held a high position in the suburb. Hilda was handicapped by the fact that she could not easily strike up friendships with other women. She had had one friend, and after Janet"s departure she had fully confided in no woman. Moreover it was only at intervals that Hilda felt the need of companionship. Her present party was due chiefly to what Edwin in his more bitter moods would have called sn.o.bbishness,--to-wit, partly a sudden resolve not to be outshone by the Swetnams, who in recent years, as the younger generation of the family grew up, had beyond doubt increased their ascendancy; and partly the desire to render memorable the last months of her residence in Bleakridge.
The list of Hilda"s guests, and the names absent from it, gave an indication of the trend of social history. The Benbows were not asked; the relations of the two families remained as friendly as ever they were, but the real breach between them, caused by profound differences of taste and intelligence, was now complete. Maggie would have been asked, had she not refused in advance, from a motive of shyness. In all essential respects Maggie had been annexed by Clara and Albert. She had given up Auntie Hamps"s house (of which the furniture had been either appropriated or sold) and gone to live with the Benbows as a working aunt,--this in spite of Albert"s default in the matter of interest; she forewent her rights, slept in a small room with Amy, paid a share of the household expenses, and did the work of a nursemaid and servant combined--simply because she was Maggie. She might, had she chosen, have lived in magnificence with the Clayhangers, but she would not face the intellectual and social strain of doing so. Jim Orgreave was not invited; briefly he had become impossible, though he was still well-dressed. More strange--Tom Orgreave and his wife had only been invited after some discussion, and had declined! Tom was growing extraordinarily secretive, solitary, and mysterious. It was reported that Mrs. Tom had neither servant nor nursemaid, and that she dared not ask her husband for money to buy clothes. Yet Edwin and Tom when they met in the street always stopped for a talk, generally about books.
Daisy Marrion, who said openly that Tom and Mrs. Tom were a huge disappointment to everybody, was invited and she accepted. Janet Orgreave had arrived in Bursley on a visit to the Clayhangers on the very day of the party. The Cheswardines were asked, mainly on account of Stephen, whose bluff, utterly unintellectual, profound good-nature, and whose adoration of his wife, were gradually endearing him to the perceptive. Mr. and Mrs. Fearns were requested to bring their daughter Annunciata, now almost marriageable, and also Mademoiselle Renee Souchon, the French governess, newly arrived in the district, of the Fearns younger children. Folks hinted their astonishment that Alma Fearns should have been imprudent enough to put so exotic a woman under the same roof with her husband. Ingpen needed no invitation; nothing could occur at the Clayhangers" without him. Doctor Stirling was the other mature bachelor. Finally in the catalogue were four Swetnams, the vigorous and acute Sarah (who was a mere acquaintance), aged twenty-five, Tom Swetnam, and two younger brothers. Tom had to bring with him the prime excuse for the party,--namely, Miss Manna Host of Copenhagen, to whom Hilda intended to show that the Swetnams were not the only people on earth. There were thus eight women, eight men (who had put on evening dress out of respect for the foreigner), and George.
At eleven o"clock, when the musical part of the entertainment was over, Miss Host had already fully secured for herself the position which later she was to hold as the wife of Tom Swetnam. Bleakridge had been asked to meet her and inspect her, and the opinion of Bleakridge was soon formed that Copenhagen must be a wondrous and a romantic place and that Tom Swetnam knew his way about. In the earliest years when the tourist agencies first discovered the advertising value of the phrase "Land of the Midnight Sun," Tom the adventurous had made the Scandinavian round trip, and each subsequent Summer he had gone off again in the same direction. The serpents of the Hanbridge and the Bursley Conservative clubs, and of the bar of the Five Towns Hotel, had wagered that there was a woman at the bottom of it. There was. He had met her at Marienlyst, the watering-place near Helsingor (called by the tourist agencies Elsinore). Manna Host was twenty-three, tall and athletically slim, and more blonde than any girl ever before seen in the Five Towns.
She had golden hair and she wore white. It was understood that she spoke Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. She talked French with facility to Renee Souchon. And Tom said that her knowledge of German surpa.s.sed her knowledge of either French or English. She spoke English excellently, with a quaint, endearing accent, but with correctness. Sometimes she would use an idiom (picked up from the Swetnam boys), exquisitely unaware that it was not quite suited to the lips of a young woman in a strange drawing-room; her innocence, however, purified it.
She sang cla.s.sical songs in German, with dramatic force, and she could play accompaniments. She was thoroughly familiar with all the music haltingly performed by Ingpen, Janet, Annunciata, and young George.
Ingpen was very seriously interested in her views thereon. She knew about the French authors from whose works Renee Souchon chose her recitations. And standing up at the buffet table in the dining-room, she had fabricated astounding sandwiches in the Danish style. She stated that Danish cooks reckoned ninety-three sorts of sandwiches. She said in her light, eager voice, apropos of cooking: "There is one thing I cannot understand. I cannot understand why you English throw your potatoes to melt in cold water for an hour before you boil them." "Nor I!" interjected Renee Souchon. No other woman standing round the table had ever conceived the propriety of boiling potatoes without first soaking them in cold water, and Manna was requested to explain.
"Because," she said, "it--it lets go the salts of pota.s.sium which are so necessary for the pheesical deve*lop*ment of the body." Whereupon Tertius Ingpen had been taken by one of his long _crescendo_ laughs, a laugh that ended by his being bent nearly double below the level of the table. Everybody was much impressed, and Ingpen himself not the least.
Ingpen wondered what a girl so complex could see in a man like Tom Swetnam, who, although he could talk about the arts, had no real feeling for any of them.
But what impressed the company even more than Miss Host"s accomplishments was the candid fervour of her comprehensive interest in life, which was absolutely without self-consciousness or fear. She talked with the same disarming ingenuous eager directness to hard-faced Charles Fearns, the secret rake; to his wife, the ageing and sweetly-sad mother of a family; to Renee Souchon, who despite her plainness and her rumoured bigotry seemed to attract all the men in the room by something provocative in her eye and the carriage of her hips; to the simple and powerful Stephen Cheswardine; to Vera, the delicious and elegant cat; to Doctor Stirling with his Scotch mysticism, and to Tertius Ingpen the connoisseur and avowed bachelor. She spoke to Hilda, Janet and Daisy Marrion as one member of a secret sisterhood to other members, to Annunciata as a young girl, and to George as an initiated sister. She left them to turn to Edwin with a trustful glance as to one whose special reliability she had divined from the first. "Have a liqueur, Miss Host," Edwin enjoined her. In a moment she was sipping Chartreuse.
"I love it!" she murmured.
But somehow beneath all such freedoms and frankness she did not cease to be a maiden with reserves of mystery. Her a.s.sumption that n.o.body could misinterpret her demeanour was remarkable to the English observers, and far more so to Renee Souchon. All gazed at her piquant blonde face, scarcely pretty, with its ardent restless eyes, and felt the startling compliment of her quick, searching sympathy. And she, tinglingly aware of her success, proved easily equal to the ordeal of it. Only at rare intervals did she give a look at the betrothed, as if for confirmation of her security. As for Tom, he was positively somewhat unnerved by the brilliance of the performance. He left her alone, without guidance, as a ring-master who should stand aside during a turn and say: "See this marvel! I am no longer necessary." When people glanced at him after one of her effects, he would glance modestly away, striving to hide from them his illusion that he himself had created the bewitching girl. At half past eleven, when the entire a.s.semblage pa.s.sed into the drawing-room, she dropped on to the piano-stool and began a Waldteufel waltz with irresistible seductiveness.
Hilda"s heart leaped. In a minute the carpet was up, and the night, which all had supposed to be at an end, began.
At nearly one o"clock in the morning the party was moving strongly by its own acquired momentum and needed neither the invigoration nor the guidance which hosts often are compelled to give. Hilda, having finished a schottische with Dr. Stirling, missed Janet from the drawing-room. Leaving the room in search of her, she saw Edwin with Tom Swetnam and the glowing Manna at the top of the stairs.
"h.e.l.lo!" she called out. "What are you folks doing?"
Manna"s light laugh descended like a shower of crystals.
"Just taking a const.i.tutional," Edwin answered.
Hilda waved to them in pa.s.sing. She was extremely elated. Among other agreeable incidents was the success of her new black lace frock.