And yet some of the most exquisite moments of their union had occurred
during that feverish and unquiet month--moments of absolute surrender
and devotion on her part, of protective love on his; and also long
moments of peace.  With the early commencement of autumn, all the family
had resumed the pursuit of letters with a certain ardour.  A startling
feminist writer, and the writer whose parentage and whose very name lay
in the Five Towns, who had re-created the East and whose vogue was a
passion among the lettered--both these had published books whose success
was extreme and genuine.  And in the curtained gas-lit drawing-room of a
night Hilda would sit rejoicing over the triumphant satire of the
woman-novelist, and Edwin and George would lounge in impossible
postures, each mesmerised by a story of the Anglo-Indian; and between
chapters Edwin might rouse himself from the enchantment sufficiently to
reflect: "How indescribably agreeable these evenings are!"  And ten to
one he would say aloud, with false severity: "George! Bed!"  And George,
a fine judge of genuineness in severity, would murmur carelessly: "All
right!  I’m going!"  And not go.

And now Edwin in the office thought:

"She’s come to fetch me away."

He was gratified.  But he must not seem to be gratified.  The sanctity
of business from invasion had to be upheld.  He frowned, feigning more
diligently than ever to be occupied.  She came in, with that air at once
apologetic and defiant that wives have in affronting the sacred
fastness.  Nobody could have guessed that she had ever been a business
woman, arriving regularly at just such an office every morning,
shorthand-writing, twisting a copying-press, filing, making
appointments.  Nobody could have guessed that she had ever been in
business for herself, and had known how sixpence was added to sixpence
and a week’s profit lost in an hour.  All such knowledge had apparently
dropped from her like an excrescence, had vanished like a temporary
disfigurement, and she looked upon commerce with the uncomprehending,
careless, and yet impressed eyes of a young girl.

"Hello, missis!" he exclaimed casually.

Then George came in.  Since the visit to Dartmoor Hilda had much
increased her intimacy with George, spending a lot of time with him,
walking with him, and exploring in a sisterly and reassuring manner his
most private life.  George liked it, but it occasionally irked him and
he would give a hint to Edwin that mother needed to be handled at times.

"You needn’t come in here, George," said Hilda.

"Well, can I go into the engine-house?" George suggested.  Edwin had
always expected that he would prefer the machine-room.  But the
engine-house was his haunt, probably because it was dirty, fiery, and
stuffy.

"No, you can’t," said Edwin.  "Pratt’s gone by this, and it’s shut up."

"No, it isn’t.  Pratt’s there."

"All right."

"Shut the door, dear," said Hilda.

"Hooray!"  George ran off and banged the glass door.

Hilda, glancing by habit at the unsightly details of the deteriorating
room, walked round the desk. With apprehension Edwin saw resolve and
perturbation in her face.  He was about to say: "Look here, infant, I’m
supposed to be busy."  But he refrained.

Holding out a letter which she nervously snatched from her bag, Hilda
said:

"I’ve just had this--by the afternoon post.  Read it."

He recognised at once the sloping handwriting; but the paper was
different; it was a mere torn half-sheet of very cheap notepaper.  He
read: "Dear Mrs. Clayhanger.  Just a line to say that my husband is at
last discharged.  It has been weary waiting. We are together, and I am
looking after him.  With renewed thanks for your sympathy and help.
Believe me, Sincerely yours, Charlotte M. Cannon."  The signature was
scarcely legible.  There was no address, no date.

Edwin’s first flitting despicable masculine thought was: "She doesn’t
say anything about that ten pounds!"  It fled.  He was happy in an
intense relief that affected all his being.  He said to himself: "Now
that’s over, we can begin again."

"Well," he murmured.  "That’s all right.  Didn’t I always tell you it
would take some time? ... That’s all right."

He gazed at the paper, waving it in his hand as he held it by one
corner.  He perceived that it was the letter of a jealous woman, who had
got what she wanted and meant to hold it, and entirely to herself; and
his mood became somewhat sardonic.

"Very curt, isn’t it?" said Hilda strangely.  "And after all this time,
too!"

He looked up at her, turning his head sideways to catch her eyes.

"That letter," he said in a voice as strange as Hilda’s, "that letter is
exactly what it ought to be. It could not possibly have been better
turned.... You don’t want to keep it, I suppose, do you?"

"No," she muttered.

He tore it into very small pieces, and dropped them into the
waste-paper-basket beneath the desk.

"And burn all the others," he said, in a low tone.

"Edwin," after a pause.

"Yes?"

"Don’t you think George ought to know?  Don’t you think one of us ought
to tell him,--either you or me?  You might tell him?"

"Tell him what?" Edwin demanded sharply, pushing back his chair.

"Well, everything!"

He glowered.  He could feel himself glowering.  He could feel the
justifiable anger animating him.

"Certainly not!" he enunciated resentfully, masterfully, overpoweringly.
"Certainly not!"

"But supposing he hears from outsiders?"

"You needn’t begin supposing."

"But he’s bound to have to know sometime."

"Possibly.  But he isn’t going to know now, any road!  Not with my
consent.  The thing’s absolute madness."

Hilda almost whispered:

"Very well, dear.  If you think so."

"I do think so."

He suddenly felt very sorry for her.  He was ready to excuse her
astounding morbidity as a consequence of extreme spiritual tribulation.
He added with brusque good-nature:

"And so will you, in the morning, my child."

"Shall you be long?"

"No.  I told you I should be late.  If you’ll run off, my chuck, I’ll
undertake to be after you in half an hour."

"Is your headache better?"

"No.  On the other hand, it isn’t worse."

He gazed fiercely at the wages-book.

She bent down.

"Kiss me," she murmured tearfully.

As he kissed her, and as she pressed against him, he absorbed and
understood all the emotions through which she had passed and was
passing, and from him to her was transmitted an unimaginable tenderness
that shamed and atoned for the inclemency of his refusals.  He was very
happy.  He knew that he would not do another stroke of work that night,
but still he must pretend to do some.  Playfully, without rising, he
drew down her veil, smacked her gently on the back, and indicated the
door.

"I have to call at Clara’s about that wool for Maggie," she said, with
courage.  His fingering of her veil had given her extreme pleasure.

"I’ll bring the kid up," he said.

"Will you?"

She departed, leaving the door unlatched.

                                   II

A draught from the outer door swung wide-open the unlatched door of
Edwin’s room.

"What are doors for?" he muttered, pleasantly impatient; then he called
aloud:

"Simpson.  Shut the outer door--and this one, too."

There was no answer.  He arose and went to the outer office.  Hilda had
passed through it like an arrow.  Simpson was not there.  But a man
stood leaning against the mantelpiece; he held at full spread a copy of
the _Signal_, which concealed all the upper part of him except his
fingers and the crown of his head.  Though the gas had been lighted in
the middle of the room, it must have been impossible for him to read by
it, since it shone through the paper.  He lowered the newspaper with a
rustle and looked at Edwin. He was a big, well-dressed man, wearing a
dark grey suit, a blue Melton overcoat, and a quite new glossy
"boiler-end" felt hat.  He had a straight, prominent nose, and dark,
restless eyes, set back; his short hair was getting grey, but not his
short black moustache.

"Were you waiting to see me?" Edwin said, in a defensive, half-hostile
tone.  The man might be a belated commercial traveller of a big
house--some of those fellows considered themselves above all laws; on
the other hand he might be a new; customer in a hurry.

"Yes," was the reply, in a deep, full and yet uncertain voice.  "The
clerk said you couldn’t be disturbed, and asked me to wait.  Then he
went out."

"What can I do for you?  It’s really after hours, but some of us are
working a bit late."

The man glanced at the outer door, which Edwin was shutting, and then at
the inner door, which exposed Edwin’s room.

"I’m George Cannon," he said, advancing a step, as it were defiantly.

For an instant Edwin was frightened by the sudden melodrama of the
situation.  Then he thought:

"I am up against this man.  This is a crisis."

And he became almost agreeably aware of his own being.  The man stood
close to him, under the gas, with all the enigmatic quality of another
being.  He could perceive now--at any rate he could believe--that it was
George Cannon.  Forgetful of what the man had suffered, Edwin felt for
him nothing but the instinctive inimical distrust of the individual who
has never got at loggerheads with society for the individual who once
and for always has.  To this feeling was added a powerful resentment of
the man’s act in coming--especially unannounced--to just _him_, the
husband of the woman he had dishonoured.  It was a monstrous act--and
doubtless an act characteristic of the man.  It was what might have been
expected. The man might have been innocent of a particular crime, might
have been falsely imprisoned; but what had he originally been doing,
with what rascals had he been consorting, that he should be even
suspected of crime?  George Cannon’s astonishing presence, so suddenly
after his release, at the works of Edwin Clayhanger, was unforgiveable.
Edwin felt an impulse to say savagely:

"Look here.  You clear out.  You understand English, don’t you?  Hook
it."

But he had not the brutality to say it.  Moreover, the clerk returned,
carrying, full to the brim, the tin water-receptacle used for wetting
the damping-brush of the copying-press.

"Will you come in, please?" said Edwin curtly. "Simpson, I’m engaged."

The two men went into the inner room.

"Sit down," said Edwin grimly.

George Cannon, with a firm gesture, planted his hat on the flat desk
between them.  He looked round behind him at the shut glazed door.

"You needn’t be afraid," said Edwin.  "Nobody can hear--unless you
shout."

He gazed curiously but somewhat surreptitiously at George Cannon, trying
to decide whether it was possible to see in him a released convict.  He
decided that it was not possible.  George Cannon had a shifty, but not a
beaten, look; many men had a shifty look.  His hair was somewhat short,
but so was the hair of many men, if not of most.  He was apparently in
fair health; assuredly his constitution had not been ruined.  And if his
large, coarse features were worn, marked with tiny black spots, and
seamed and generally ravaged, they were not more ravaged than the
features of numerous citizens of Bursley aged about fifty who saved
money, earned honours, and incurred the envy of presumably intelligent
persons.  And as he realised all this, Edwin’s retrospective painful
alarm as to what might have happened if Hilda had noticed George Cannon
in the outer office lessened until he could dismiss it entirely.  By
chance she had ignored Cannon, perhaps scarcely seeing him in her
preoccupied passage, perhaps taking him vaguely for a customer; but
supposing she _had_ recognised him, what then?  There would have been an
awkward scene--nothing more. Awkward scenes do not kill; their effect is
transient. Hilda would have had to behave, and would have behaved, with
severe commonsense.  He, Edwin himself, would have handled the affair.
A demeanour matter-of-fact and impassible was what was needed.  After
all, a man recently out of prison was not a wild beast, nor yet a freak.
Hundreds of men were coming out of prisons every day....  He should know
how to deal with this man--not pharisaically, not cruelly, not unkindly,
but still with a clear indication to the man of his reprehensible
indiscretion in being where he then was.

"Did she recognise me--down there--Dartmoor?" asked George Cannon,
without any preparing of the ground, in a deep, trembling voice; and as
he spoke a flush spread slowly over his dark features.

"Er--yes!" answered Edwin, and his voice also trembled.

"I wasn’t sure," said George Cannon.  "We were halted before I could
see.  And I daren’t look round--I should ha’ been punished.  I’ve been
punished before now for looking up at the sky at exercise."  He spoke
more quickly and then brought himself up with a snort. "However, I’ve
not come all the way here to talk prison, so you needn’t be afraid.  I’m
not one of your reformers."

In his weak but ungoverned nervous excitement, from which a faint trace
of hysteria was not absent, he now seemed rather more like an
ex-convict, despite his good clothes.  He had become, to Edwin’s
superior self-control, suddenly wistful.  And at the same time, the
strange opening question, and its accent, had stirred Edwin, and he saw
with remorse how much finer had been Hilda’s morbid and violent pity
than his own harsh commonsense and anxiety to avoid emotion.  The man in
good clothes moved him more than the convict had moved him.  He seemed
to have received vision, and he saw not merely the unbearable pathos of
George Cannon, but the high and heavenly charitableness of Hilda, which
he had constantly douched, and his own common earthliness.  He was
exceedingly humbled. And he also thought, sadly: "This chap’s still
attached to her.  Poor devil!"

"What have you come for?" he enquired.

George Cannon cleared his throat.  Edwin waited, in fear, for the
avowal.  He could make nothing out of the visitor’s face; its expression
was anxious and drew sympathy, but there was something in it which
chilled the sympathy it invoked and which seemed to say: "I shall look
after myself."  It yielded naught. You could be sorry for the heart
within, and yet could neither like nor esteem it.  "Punished for looking
up at the sky." ... Glimpses of prison life presented themselves to
Edwin’s imagination.  He saw George Cannon again halted and turning like
a serf to the wall of the corridor.  And this man opposite to him, close
to him in the familiar room, was the same man as the serf!  Was he the
same man? ... Inscrutable, the enigma of that existence whose breathing
was faintly audible across the desk.

"You know all about it--about my affair, of course?"

"Well," said Edwin.  "I expect you know how much I know."

"I’m an honest man--you know that.  I needn’t begin by explaining that
to you."

Edwin nerved himself:

"You weren’t honest towards Hilda, if it comes to that."

He used his wife’s Christian name, to this man with whom he had never
before spoken, naturally, inevitably. He would not say "my wife."  To
have said "my wife" would somehow have brought some muddiness upon that
wife, and by contact upon her husband.

"When I say ’honest’ I mean--you know what I mean. About Hilda--I don’t
defend that.  Only I couldn’t help myself....  I daresay I should do it
again."  Edwin could feel his eyes smarting and he blinked, and yet he
was angry with the man, who went on: "It’s no use talking about that.
That’s over.  And I couldn’t help it.  I had to do it.  She’s come out
of it all right.  She’s not harmed, and I thank God for it!  If there’d
been a child living ... well, it would ha’ been different."

Edwin started.  This man didn’t know he was a father--and his son was
within a few yards of him--might come running in at any moment!  (No!
Young George would not come in.  Nothing but positive orders would get
the boy out of the engine-house so long as the engine-man remained
there.)  Was it possible that Hilda had concealed the existence of her
child, or had announced the child’s death?  If so, she had never done a
wiser thing, and such sagacity struck him as heroic.  But if Mrs. Cannon
knew as to the child, then it was Mrs. Cannon who, with equal prudence
and for a different end, had concealed its existence from George Cannon
or lied to him as to its death.  Certainly the man was sincere.  As he
said "Thank God!" his full voice had vibrated like the voice of an
ardent religionist at a prayer-meeting.

George Cannon began again:

"All I mean is I’m an honest man.  I’ve been damnably treated.  Not that
I want to go into that.  No! I’m a fatalist.  That’s over.  That’s done
with.  I’m not whining.  All I’m insisting on is that I’m not a thief,
and I’m not a forger, and I’ve nothing to hide. Perhaps I brought my
difficulties about that bank-note business on myself.  But when you’ve
once been in prison, you don’t choose your friends--you can’t. Perhaps I
might have ended by being a thief or a forger, only on this occasion it
just happens that I’ve had a good six years for being innocent.  I never
did anything wrong, or even silly, except let myself get too fond of
somebody.  That might happen to anyone. It did happen to me.  But
there’s nothing else.  You understand?  I never--"

"Yes, yes, certainly!" said Edwin, stopping him as he was about to
repeat all the argument afresh.  It was a convincing argument.

"No one’s got the right to look down on me, I mean," George Cannon
insisted, bringing his face forward over the desk.  "On the contrary
this country owes me an apology.  However, I don’t want to go into that.
That’s done with.  Spilt milk’s spilt.  I know what the world is."

"I agree.  I agree!" said Edwin.

He did.  The honesty of his intelligence admitted almost too eagerly and
completely the force of the pleading.

"Well," said George Cannon, "to cut it short, I want help.  And I’ve
come to you for it."

"Me!" Edwin feebly exclaimed.

"You, Mr. Clayhanger!  I’ve come straight here from London.  I haven’t a
friend in the whole world, not one.  It’s not everybody can say that.
There was a fellow named Dayson at Turnhill--used to work for me--he’d
have done something if he could.  But he was too big a fool to be able
to; and besides, he’s gone, no address.  I wrote to him."

"Oh, that chap!" murmured Edwin, trying to find relief in even a
momentary turn of the conversation. "I know who you mean.
Shorthand-writer.  He died in the Isle of Man on his holiday two years
ago.  It was in the papers."

"_That’s_ his address, is it?  Good old Dead Letter Office!  Well, he is
crossed off the list, then; no mistake!" Cannon snarled bitterly.  "I’m
aware you’re not a friend of mine.  I’ve no claim on you.  You don’t
know me; but you know about me.  When I saw you in Dartmoor I guessed
who you were, and I said to myself you looked the sort of man who might
help another man....  Why did you come into the prison?  Why did you
bring her there?  You must have known I was there."  He spoke with a
sudden change to reproachfulness.

"I didn’t bring her there."  Edwin blushed.  "It was----  However, we
needn’t go into that, if you don’t mind."

"Was she upset?"

"Of course."

Cannon sighed.

"What do you want me to do?" asked Edwin gloomily. In secret he was
rather pleased that George Cannon should have deemed him of the sort
likely to help. Was it the flattery of a mendicant?  No, he did not
think it was.  He believed implicitly everything the man was saying.

"Money!" said Cannon sharply.  "Money!  You won’t feel it, but it will
save me.  After all, Mr. Clayhanger, there’s a bond between us, if it
comes to that. There’s a bond between us.  And you’ve had all the luck
of it."

Again Edwin blushed.

"But surely your wife--" he stammered.  "Surely Mrs. Cannon isn’t
without funds.  Of course I know she was temporarily rather short a
while back, but surely--"

"How do you know she was short?" Cannon grimly interrupted.

"My wife sent her ten pounds--I fancy it was ten pounds--towards
expenses, you know."

Cannon ejaculated, half to himself, savagely:

"Never told me!"

He remained silent.

"But I’ve always understood she’s a woman of property," Edwin finished.

Cannon put both elbows on the desk, leaned further forward, and opened
his mouth several seconds before speaking.

"Mr. Clayhanger, I’ve left my wife--as you call her.  If I’d stayed with
her I should have killed her. I’ve run off.  Yes, I know all she’s done
for me.  I know without her I might have been in prison to-day and for a
couple o’ years to come.  But I’d sooner be in prison or in hell or
anywhere you like than with Mrs. Cannon.  She’s an old woman.  She
always was an old woman.  She was nearly forty when she hooked me, and I
was twenty-two.  And I’m young yet.  I’m not middle-aged yet.  She’s got
a clear conscience, Mrs. Cannon has.  She always does her duty.  She’d
let me walk over her, she’d never complain, if only she could keep me.
She’d just play and smile.  Oh yes, she’d turn the other cheek--and keep
on turning it. But she isn’t going to have me.  And for all she’s done
I’m not grateful.  Hag.  That’s what she is!"  He spoke loudly,
excitedly, under considerable emotion.

"Hsh!" Edwin, alarmed, endeavoured gently to soothe him.

"All right!  All right!" Cannon proceeded in a lower but still
impassioned voice.  "But look here! You’re a man.  You know what’s what.
You’ll understand what I mean.  Believe me when I say that I wouldn’t
live with that woman for eternal salvation. I couldn’t.  I couldn’t do
it.  I’ve taken some of her money, only a little, and run off..."  He
paused, and went on with conscious persuasiveness now: "I’ve just got
here.  I had to ask your whereabouts.  I might have been recognised in
the streets, but I haven’t been.  I didn’t expect to find you here at
this time. I might have had to sleep in the town to-night.  I wouldn’t
have come to your private house.  Now I’ve seen you I shall get along to
Crewe to-night.  I shall be safer there.  And it’s on the way to
Liverpool and America.  I want to go to America.  With a bit o’ capital
I shall be all right in America.  It’s my one chance; but it’s a good
one.  But I must have some capital.  No use landing in New York with
empty pockets."

Said Edwin, still shying at the main issues:

"I was under the impression you had been to America once."

"Yes, that’s why I know.  I hadn’t any money. And what’s more," he added
with peculiar emphasis, "I was brought back."

Edwin thought:

"I shall yield to this man."

At that instant he saw the shadow of Hilda’s head and shoulders on the
glass of the door.

"Excuse me a second," he murmured, bounded with astonishing velocity out
of the room, and pulled the door to after him with a bang.

Hilda, having observed the strange, excited gesture, paused a moment, in
an equally strange tranquillity, before speaking.  Edwin fronted her at
the very door. Then she said, clearly and deliberately, through her
veil:

"Auntie Hamps has had an attack--heart.  The doctor says she can’t
possibly live through the night. It was at Clara’s."

This was the first of Mrs. Hamps’s fatal heart-attacks.

"Ah!" breathed Edwin, with apparently a purely artistic interest in the
affair.  "So that’s it, is it? Then she’s at Clara’s."

"Yes."

"What doctor?"

"I forget his name.  Lives in Acre Lane.  They sent for the nearest.
She can’t get her breath--has to fight for it.  She jumped out of bed,
struggling to breathe."

"Have you seen her?"

"Yes.  They made me."

"Albert there?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well, I suppose I’d better go round.  You go back.  I’ll follow you."

He was conscious of not the slightest feeling of sorrow at the imminent
death of Auntie Hamps.  Even the image of the old lady fighting to fetch
her breath scarcely moved him, though the deathbed of his father had
been harrowing enough.  He and Hilda had the same thought: "At last
something has happened to Auntie Hamps!"  And it gave zest.

"I must speak to you," said Hilda, low, and moved towards the inner
door.

The clerk Simpson was behind them at his ink-stained desk, stamping
letters, and politely pretending to be deaf.

"No," Edwin stopped her.  "There’s someone in there.  We can’t talk
there."

"A customer?"

"Yes ... I say, Simpson.  Have you done those letters?"

"Yes, sir," answered Simpson, smiling.  He had been recommended as a
"very superior" youth, and had not disappointed, despite a
constitutional nervousness.

"Take them to the pillar, and call at Mr. Benbow’s and tell them that
I’ll be round in about a quarter of an hour.  I don’t know as you need
come back. Hurry up."

"Yes, sir."

Edwin and Hilda watched Simpson go.

"Whatever’s the matter?" Hilda demanded in a low, harsh voice, as soon
as the outer door had clicked. It was as if something sinister in her
had been suddenly released.

"Matter?  Nothing.  Why?"

"You look so queer."

"Well--you come along with these shocks."  He gave a short, awkward
laugh.  He felt and looked guilty, and he knew that he looked guilty.

"You looked queer when you came out."

"You’ve upset yourself, my child, that’s all."  He now realised the high
degree of excitement which he himself, without previously being aware of
it, had reached.

"Edwin, who is it in there?"

"Don’t I tell you--it’s a customer."

He could see her nostrils twitching through, the veil.

"It’s George Cannon in there!" she exclaimed.

He laughed again.  "What makes you feel that?" he asked, feeling all the
while the complete absurdity of such fencing.

"When I ran out I noticed somebody.  He was reading a newspaper and I
couldn’t see him.  But he just moved it a bit, and I seemed to catch
sight of the top of his head.  And when I got into the street I said to
myself, ’It looked like George Cannon,’ and then I said, ’Of course it
couldn’t be.’  And then with this business about Auntie Hamps the idea
went right out of my head."

"Well, it is, if you want to know."

Her mysterious body and face seemed to radiate a disastrous emotion that
filled the whole office.

"Did you know he was coming?"

"I did not.  Hadn’t the least notion!"  The sensation of criminality
began to leave Edwin.  As Hilda seemed to move and waver, he added:

"Now you aren’t going to see him!"

And his voice menacingly challenged her, and defied her to stir a step.
The most important thing in the world, then, was that Hilda should not
see George Cannon.  He would stop her by force.  He would let himself
get angry and brutal.  He would show her that he was the stronger.  He
had quite abandoned his earlier attitude of unsentimental callousness
which argued that after all it wouldn’t ultimately matter whether they
encountered each other or not.  Far from that, he was, so it appeared to
him, standing between them, desperate and determined, and acting
instinctively and conventionally.  Their separate pasts, each full of
grief and tragedy, converged terribly upon him in an effort to meet in
just that moment, and he was ferociously resisting.

"What does he want?"

"He wants me to help him to go to America."

"_You!_"

"He says he hasn’t a friend."

"But what about his wife?"

"That’s just what I said....  He’s left her.  Says he can’t live with
her."

There was a silence, in which the tension appreciably lessened.

"Can’t live with her!  Well, I’m not surprised.  But I do think it’s
strange, him coming to you."

"So do I," said Edwin drily, taking the upper hand; for the change in
Hilda’s tone--her almost childlike satisfaction in the news that Cannon
would not live with his wife--seemed to endow him with superiority.
"But there’s a lot of strange things in this world.  Now listen here.
I’m not going to keep him waiting; I can’t."

He then spoke very gravely, authoritatively and ominously: "Find George
and take him home at once."

Hilda, impressed, gave a frown.

"I think it’s very wrong that you should be asked to help him."  Her
voice shook and nearly broke. "Shall you help him, Edwin?"

"I shall get him out of this town at once, and out of the country.  Do
as I say.  As things are he doesn’t know there is any George, and it’s
just as well he shouldn’t.  But if he stays anywhere about, he’s bound
to know."

All Hilda’s demeanour admitted that George Cannon had never been allowed
to know that he had a son; and the simple candour of the admission
frightened Edwin by its very simplicity.

"Now!  Off you go!  George is in the engine-house."

Hilda moved reluctantly towards the outer-door, like a reproved and
rebellious schoolgirl.  Suddenly she burst into tears, sprang at Edwin,
and, putting her arms round his neck, kissed him through the veil.

"Nobody but you would have helped him--in your place!" she murmured
passionately, half admiring, half protesting.  And with a backward look
as she hurried off, her face stern and yet soft seemed to appeal: "Help
him."

Edwin was at once deeply happy and impregnated with a sense of the
frightful sadness that lurks in the hollows of the world.  He stood
alone with the flaring gas, overcome.

                                   IV

He went back to the private room, self-conscious and rather tongue-tied,
with a clear feeling of relief that Hilda was disposed of, removed from
the equation--and not unsuccessfully.  After the woman, to deal with the
man, in the plain language of men, seemed simple and easy.  He was
astounded, equally, by the grudging tardiness of Mrs. Cannon’s
information to Hilda as to the release, and by the baffling, inflexible
detraction of Hilda’s words: "Well, I’m not surprised."  And the
flitting image of Auntie Hamps fighting for life still left him
untouched.  He looked at George Cannon, and George Cannon, with his
unreliable eyes, looked at him.  He almost expected Cannon to say: "Was
that Hilda you were talking to out there?"  But Cannon seemed to have no
suspicion that, in either the inner or the outer room, he had been so
close to her.  No doubt, when he was waiting by the mantel-piece in the
outer room, he had lifted the paper as soon as he heard the door
unlatched, expressly in order to screen himself from observation.
Probably he had not even guessed that the passer was a woman.  Had
Simpson been there, the polite young man would doubtless have said:
"Good night, Mrs. Clayhanger," but Simpson had happened not to be there.

"Are you going to help me?" asked George Cannon, after a moment, and his
heavy voice was so beseeching, so humble, so surprisingly sycophantic,
so fearful, that Edwin could scarcely bear to hear it.  He hated to hear
that one man could be so slavishly dependent on another.  Indeed, he
much preferred Cannon’s defiant, half-bullying tone.

"Yes," said he.  "I shall do what I can.  What do you want?"

"A hundred pounds," said George Cannon, and, as he named the sum, his
glance was hard and steady.

Edwin was startled.  But immediately he began to readjust his ideas,
persuading himself that after all the man could not prudently have asked
for less.

"I can’t give it you all now."

Cannon’s face lighted up in relief and joy.  His black eyes sparkled
feverishly with the impatience of an almost hopeless desire about to be
satisfied. Although he did not move, his self-control had for the moment
gone completely, and the secrets of his soul were exposed.

"Can you send it me--in notes?  I can give you an address in Liverpool."
His voice could hardly utter the words.

"Wait a second," said Edwin.

He went to the safe let into the wall, of which he was still so naïvely
proud, and unlocked it with the owner’s gesture.  The perfect fitting of
the bright key, the ease with which it turned, the silent, heavy swing
of the massive door on its hinges--these things gave him physical as
well as moral pleasure.  He savoured the security of his position and
his ability to rescue people from destruction.  From the cavern of the
safe he took out a bag of gold, part of the money required for wages on
the morrow,--he would have to send to the Bank again in the morning.  He
knew that the bag contained exactly twenty pounds in half-sovereigns,
but he shed the lovely twinkling coins on the desk and counted them.

"Here," he said.  "Here’s twenty pounds.  Take the bag, too--it’ll be
handier," and he put the money into the bag.  Then a foolish, grand idea
struck him.  "Write down the address on this envelope, will you, and
I’ll send you a hundred to-morrow.  You can rely on it."

"Eighty, you mean," muttered George Cannon.

"No," said Edwin, with affected nonchalance, blushing, "a hundred.  The
twenty will get you over and you’ll have a hundred clear when you arrive
on the other side."

"Ye’re very kind," said Cannon weakly.  "I--"

"Here.  Here’s the envelope.  Here’s a bit of pencil."  Edwin stopped
him hastily.  His fear of being thanked made him harsh.

While Cannon was nervously writing the address, he noticed that the
man’s clumsy fingers were those of a day-labourer.

"You’ll get it all back.  You’ll see," said Cannon, as he stood up to
leave, holding his glossy felt hat in his left hand.

"Don’t worry about that.  I don’t want it.  You owe me nothing."

"You’ll have every penny back, and before long, too."

Edwin smiled, deprecating the idea.

"Well, good luck!" he said.  "You’ll get to Crewe all right.  There’s a
train at Shawport at eight seven."

They shook hands, and quitted the inner office.  As he traversed the
outer office on his way forth, in front of Edwin, Cannon turned his
head, as if to say something, but, confused, he said nothing and went
on, and at once he disappeared into the darkness outside.  And Edwin was
left with a memory of his dubious eyes, hard rather than confident,
profoundly relieved rather than profoundly grateful.

"By Jove!" Edwin murmured by himself.  "Who’d have thought it? ... They
say those chaps always turn up again like bad pennies, but I bet he
won’t."  Simultaneously he reflected upon the case of Mrs. Cannon,
deserted; but it did not excite his pity.  He fastened the safe,
extinguished the lights, shut the office, and prepared his mind for the
visit to Auntie Hamps.

                                   V

Hilda and her son were in the dining-room, in which the table, set for a
special meal--half-tea, half-supper--made a glittering oblong of white.
On the table, among blue-and-white plates, and knives and forks, lay
some of George’s shabby school-books.  In most branches of knowledge
George privately knew that he could instruct his parents--especially his
mother. Nevertheless that beloved outgrown creature was still
occasionally useful at home-lessons, as for instance in "poetry."
George, disdainful, had to learn some verses each week, and now his
mother held a book entitled "The Poetry Reciter," while George mumbled
with imperfect verbal accuracy the apparently immortal lines:

    Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase,
    Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.

His mother, however, scarcely regarded the book. She knew the poem by
heart, and had indeed recited it to George, who, though he was much
impressed by her fire, could not by any means have been persuaded to
imitate the freedom of her delivery.  His elocution to-night was
unusually bad, for the reason that he had been pleasurably excited by
the immense news of Auntie Hamps’s illness.  Not that he had any grudge
against Auntie Hamps!  His pleasure would have been as keen in the grave
illness of any other important family connection, save his mother and
Edwin.  Such notable events gave a sensational interest to domestic life
which domestic life as a rule lacked.

Then, through the half-open door of the dining-room came the sound of
Edwin’s latch-key in the front-door.

"There’s uncle!" exclaimed George, and jumped up.

Hilda stopped him.

"Put your books together," said she.  "You know uncle likes to go up to
the bathroom before he does anything!"

It was a fact that the precisian hated even to be greeted, on his return
home in the evening, until he came downstairs from the bathroom.

Hilda herself collected the books and put them on the sideboard.

"Shall I tell Ada?" George suggested, champing the bit.

"No.  Ada knows."

With deliberation Hilda tended the fire.  Her mind was in a state of
emotional flux.  Memories and comparisons mournfully and yet agreeably
animated it. She thought of the days when she used to recite amid
enthusiasm in the old drawing-room of the Orgreaves; and of the days
when she was a wanderer, had no home, no support, little security; and
of the brief, uncertain days with George Cannon; and of the eternal days
when her only assurance was the assurance of disaster.  She glanced at
George, and saw in him reminders of his tragic secret father now hidden
away, forced into the background, like something obscene. Nearly every
development of the present out of the past seemed to her, now, to be
tragic.  Johnnie Orgreave had of course not come back from his idyll
with the ripping Mrs. Chris Hamson; their seclusion was not positively
known; but the whole district knew that the husband had begun
proceedings and that the Orgreave business was being damaged by the
incompetence of Jimmie Orgreave, whose deplorable wife had a few days
earlier been seen notoriously drunk in the dress-circle of the Hanbridge
Theatre Royal.  Janet was still at Tavy Mansion because there was no
place for her in the Five Towns.  Janet had written to Hilda, sadly, and
the letter breathed her sense of her own futility and superfluousness in
the social scheme. In one curt phrase, that very afternoon, the taciturn
Maggie, who very seldom complained, had disclosed something of what it
was to live day and night with Auntie Hamps.  Even Clara, the
self-sufficient, protected by an almost impermeable armour of conceit,
showed signs of the anxiety due to obscure chronic disease and a husband
who financially never knew where he was.  Finally, the last glories of
Auntie Hamps were sinking to ashes.  Only Hilda herself was, from nearly
every point of view, in a satisfactory and promising situation.  She
possessed love, health, money, stability.  When danger threatened, a
quiet and unfailingly sagacious husband was there to meet and destroy
it.  Surely nothing whatever worth mentioning, save the fact that she
was distantly approaching forty, troubled the existence of Hilda now;
and her age certainly did not trouble her.

Ada entered with the hot dishes, and went out.

At length Hilda heard the bathroom door.  She left the dining-room,
shutting the door on George, who could take a hint very
well--considering his years. Edwin, brushed and spruce, was coming
downstairs, rubbing his clean hands with physical satisfaction. He
nodded amiably, but without smiling.

"Has he gone?" said Hilda, in a low voice.

Edwin nodded.  He was at the foot of the stairs.

She did not offer to kiss him, having a notion that he would prefer not
to be kissed just then.

"How much did you give him?"  She knew he would not care for the
question, but she could not help putting it.

He smiled, and touched her shoulder.  She liked him to touch her
shoulder.

"That’s all right," he said, with a faint condescension. "Don’t you
worry about that."

She did not press the point.  He could be free enough with
information--except when it was demanded.  Some time later he would
begin of his own accord to talk.

"How was Auntie Hamps?"

"Well, if anything, she’s a bit easier.  I don’t mind betting she gets
over it."

They went into the dining-room almost side by side, and she enquired
again about his headache.

The meal was tranquil.  After a few moments Edwin opened the subject of
Auntie Hamps’s illness with some sardonic remarks upon the demeanour of
Albert Benbow.

"Is Auntie dying?" asked George with gusto.

Edwin replied:

"What are those schoolbooks doing there on the sideboard?  I thought it
was clearly understood that you were to do your lessons in your mother’s
boudoir."

He spoke without annoyance, but coldly.  He was aware that neither Hilda
nor her son could comprehend that to a bookman schoolbooks were not
books, but merely an eyesore.  He did not blame them for their
incapacity, but he considered that an arrangement was an arrangement.

"Mother put them there," said the base George.

"Well, you can take them away," said Edwin firmly. "Run along now."

George rose from his place between Hilda and Edwin, and from his
luscious plate, and removed the books.  Hilda watched him meekly go.
His father, too, had gone.  Edwin was in the right; his position could
not be assailed.  He had not been unpleasant, but he had spoken as one
sublimely confident that his order would not be challenged.  Within her
heart Hilda rebelled.  If Edwin had been responsible for some act
contrary to one of her decrees, she would never in his presence have
used the tone that he used to enforce obedience.  She would have laughed
or she would have frowned, but she would never have been the polite
autocrat.  Nor would he have expected her to play the rôle; he would
probably have resented it.

Why?  Were they not equals?  No, they were not equals.  The fundamental
unuttered assumption upon which the household life rested was that they
were not equals.  She might cross him, she might momentarily defy him,
she might torture him, she might drive him to fury, and still be safe
from any effective reprisals, because his love for her made her
necessary to his being; but in spite of all that his will remained the
seat of government, and she and George were only the Opposition.  In the
end, she had to incline.  She was the complement of his existence, but
he was not the complement of hers.  She was just a parasite, though an
essential parasite.  Why? ... The reason, she judged, was economic, and
solely economic.  She rebelled.  Was she not as individual, as original,
as he? Had she not a powerful mind of her own, experience of her own,
ideals of her own?  Was she not of a nature profoundly and exceptionally
independent?...

Her lot was unalterable.  She had of course, not the slightest desire to
leave him; she was devoted to him; what irked her was that, even had she
had the desire, she could not have fulfilled it, for she was too old
now, and too enamoured of comfort and security, to risk such an
enterprise.  She was a captive, and she recalled with a gentle pang,
less than regret, the days when she was unhappy and free as a man, when
she could say, "I will go to London," "I will leave London," "I am
deceived and ruined, but I am my own mistress."

These thoughts in the idyllic tranquillity of the meal, mingled, below
her smiling preoccupations of an honoured house-mistress, with the
thoughts of her love for her husband and son and of their excellences,
of the masculine love which enveloped and shielded her, of her security,
of the tragedy of the bribed and dismissed victim and villain, George
Cannon, of the sorrows of some of her friends, and of the dead.  In her
heart was the unquiet whispering: "I submit, and yet I shall never
submit."

                                BOOK III

                              EQUILIBRIUM

                              CHAPTER XVII

                             GEORGE’S EYES

Hilda sat alone in the boudoir, before the fire.  She had just come out
of the kitchen, and she was wearing the white uniform of the kitchen,
unsuited for a boudoir; but she wore it with piquancy.  The November
afternoon had passed into dusk, and through the window, over the roofs
of Hulton Street, stars could be seen in a darkening clear sky.  After a
very sharp fall and rise of the barometer, accounting for heavy
rainstorms, the first frosts were announced, and winter was on the
doorstep.  The hardy inhabitants of the Five Towns, Hilda among them,
were bracing themselves to the discipline of winter, with its mud,
increased smuts, sleet, and damp, piercing chills; and they were taking
pleasure in the tonic prospect of discomfort.  The visitation had
threatened ever since September.  Now it had positively come.  Let it
come! Build up the fire, stamp the feet, and defy it!  Hilda was
exhilarated, having been reawakened to the zest and the romance of life,
not merely by the onset of winter, but by dramatic events in the
kitchen.

A little over three years had elapsed since the closing of the episode
of George Cannon, and for two of those years Hilda had had peace in the
kitchen.  She had been the firm mistress who knows what she wants, and,
knowing also how to handle the peculiar inmates of the kitchen, gets it;
she had been the mistress who "won’t put up with" all sorts of things,
including middle-age and ugliness in servants, and whom heaven has
spoilt by too much favour.  Then the cook, with the ingratitude of a
cherished domestic, had fallen in love and carried her passion into a
cottage miles away at Longshaw.  And from that moment Hilda had ceased
to be the mistress who by firmness commands fate; she had become as
other mistresses.  In a year she had had five cooks, giving varying
degrees of intense dissatisfaction.  She had even dismissed the slim and
constant Ada once, but, yielding to an outburst of penitent affection,
had withdrawn the notice.  The last cook, far removed from youthfulness
or prettiness, had left suddenly that day, after insolence, after the
discovery of secret beer and other vileness in the attic-bedroom, after
a scene in which Hilda had absolutely silenced her, reducing ribaldry to
sobs.  Cook and trunk expelled, Hilda had gone about the house like a
fumigation, and into the kitchen like the embodiment of calm and gay
efficiency.  She would do the cooking herself.  She would show the
kitchen that she was dependent upon nobody.  She had quickened the speed
of Ada, accused her "tartly," but not without dry good-humour, of a
disloyal secretiveness, and counselled her to mind what she was about if
she wanted to get on in the world.

Edwin knew nothing, for all had happened since his departure to the
works after midday dinner.  He would be back in due course, and George
would be back, and Tertius Ingpen (long ago reconciled) was coming for
the evening.  She would show them all three what a meal was, and
incidentally Ada would learn what a meal was.  There was nothing like
demonstrating to servants that you could beat them easily at their own
game.

She had just lived through her thirty-ninth birthday. "Forty!" she had
murmured to herself with a shiver of apprehension, meaning that the next
would be the fortieth.  It was an unpleasant experience.  She had told
Edwin not to mention her birthday abroad. Clumsy George had enquired:
"Mother, how old are you?"  To which she had replied, "Lay-ours for
meddlers!" a familiar phrase whose origin none of them understood, but
George knew that it signified, "Mind your own business."  No!  She had
not been happy on that birthday.  She had gazed into the glass and
decided that she looked old, that she did not look old, that she looked
old, endlessly alternating.  She was not stout, but her body was solid,
too solid; it had no litheness, none whatever; it was absolutely set;
the cleft under the chin was quite undeniable, and the olive complexion
subtly ravaged.  Still, not a hair of her dark head had changed colour.
It was perhaps her soul that was greying.  Her married life was fairly
calm.  It had grown monotonous in ease and tranquillity.  The sharp,
respectful admiration for her husband roused in her by his handling of
the Cannon episode, had gradually been dulled.  She had nothing against
him.  Yet she had everything against him, because apart from his grave
abiding love for her he possessed an object and interest in life, and
because she was a mere complement and he was not.  She had asked herself
the most dreadful of questions: "Why have I lived?  Why do I go on
living?" and had answered: "Because of _them_," meaning Edwin and her
son.  But it was not enough for her, who had once been violently
enterprising, pugnacious, endangered, and independent.  For after she
had watched over them she had energy to spare, and such energy was not
being employed and could not be employed. Reading--a diversion!  Fancy
work--a detestable device for killing time and energy!  Social
duties--ditto! Charity--hateful!  She had slowly descended into marriage
as into a lotus valley.  And more than half her life was gone.  She
could never detect that any other married woman in the town felt as she
felt.  She could never explain herself to Edwin, and indeed had not
tried to explain herself.

Now the affair of the alcoholic cook, aided by winter’s first fillip,
stimulated and brightened her.  And while thinking with a glance at the
clock of the precise moment when she must return to the kitchen and put
a dish down to the fire, she also thought, rather hopefully and then
quite hopefully, about the future of her marriage.  Her brain seemed to
straighten and correct itself, like the brain of one who, waking up in
the morning, slowly perceives that the middle-of-the-night
apprehensiveness about eventualities was all awry in its pessimism.  She
saw that everything could and must be improved, that the new life must
begin. Edwin needed to be inspired; she must inspire him. He slouched
more and more in his walk; he was more and more absorbed in his
business, quieter in the evenings, more impatient in the mornings.
Moreover, the household machine had been getting slack.  A general tonic
was required; she would administer it--and to herself also.  They should
all feel the invigorating ozone that very night.  She would organise
social distractions; on behalf of the home she would reclaim from the
works those odd hours and half-hours of Edwin’s which it had
imperceptibly filched.  She would have some new clothes, and she would
send Edwin to the tailor’s.  She would make him buy a dog-cart and a
horse.  Oh!  She could do it.  She had the mastery of him in many things
when she chose to be aroused.  In a word, she would "branch out."

She was not sure that she would not prosecute a campaign for putting
Edwin on the Town Council, where he certainly ought to be.  It was his
duty to take a share in public matters, and ultimately to dominate the
town. Suggestions had already been made by wirepullers, and
unreflectively repulsed by the too casual Edwin.  She saw him mayor, and
herself mayoress.  Once, the prospect of any such formal honour, with
all that it entailed of ceremoniousness and insincere civilities, would
have annoyed if not frightened her.  But now she thought, proudly and
timidly and desirously, that she would make as good a mayoress as most
mayoresses, and that she could set one or two of them an example in tact
and dignity.  Why not?  Of late neither mayors nor mayoresses in the
Five Towns had been what they used to be.  The grand tradition was
apparently in abeyance, the people who ought to carry it on seeming
somehow to despise it.  She could remember mayors, especially Chief
Bailiffs at Turnhill, who imposed themselves upon the imagination of the
town.  But nowadays the name of a mayor was never a household word. She
had even heard Ingpen ask Edwin: "See, who is the new mayor?" and Edwin
start his halting answer: "Let me see--"

And she had still another and perhaps greater ambition--to possess a
country house.  In her fancy her country house was very like Alicia
Hesketh’s house, Tavy Mansion, which she had never ceased to envy.  She
felt that in a new home, spacious, with space around it, she could
really commence the new life.  She saw the place perfectly appointed and
functioning perfectly--no bother about smuts on white curtains; no
half-trained servants; none of the base, confined, promiscuity of filthy
Trafalgar Road; and the Benbows and Auntie Hamps at least eight or ten
miles off!  She saw herself driving Edwin to the station in the morning,
or perhaps right into Bursley if she wanted to shop....  No, she would
of course shop at Oldcastle....  She would leave old Darius Clayhanger’s
miracle-house without one regret.  And in the new life she would be
always active, busy, dignified, elegant, influential, and kind.  And to
Edwin she would be absolutely indispensable.

In these imaginings their solid but tarnished love glittered and gleamed
again.  She saw naught but the charming side of Edwin and the romantic
side of their union.  She was persuaded that there really was nobody
like Edwin, and that no marriage had ever had quite the mysterious,
secretly exciting quality of hers. She yearned for him to come home at
once, to appear magically in the dusk of the doorway.  The mood was
marvellous.

                                   II

The door opened.

"Can I speak to you, m’m?"

It was the voice of Ada, somewhat perturbed.  She advanced a little and
stood darkly in front of the open doorway.

"What is it, Ada?" Hilda asked curtly, without turning to look at her.

"It’s--" Ada began and stopped.

Hilda glanced round quickly, recognising now in the voice a peculiar
note with which experience had familiarised her.  It was a note between
pertness and the beginning of a sob, and it always indicated that Ada
was feeling more acutely than usual the vast injustice of the worldly
scheme.  It might develop into tears; on the other hand it might develop
into mere insolence. Hilda discerned that Ada was wearing neither cap
nor apron.  She thought: "If this stupid girl wants trouble, she has
come to me at exactly and precisely the right moment to get it.  I’m not
in the humour, after all I’ve gone through to-day, to stand any nonsense
either from her or from anybody else."

"What is it, Ada?" she repeated, with restraint, and yet warningly.
"And where’s your apron and your cap?"

"In the kitchen, m’m."

"Well, go and put them on, and then come and say what you have to say,"
said Hilda, thinking: "I don’t give any importance to her cap and apron,
but she does."

"I was thinking I’d better give ye notice, m’m," said Ada, and she said
it pertly, ignoring the command.

The two women were alone together in the house. Each felt it; each felt
the large dark emptiness of the house behind them, and the solid front
and back doors cutting them off from succour; each had to depend
entirely upon herself.

Hilda asked quietly:

"What’s the matter now?"

She knew that Ada’s grievance would prove to be silly.  The girl had
practically no commonsense.  Not one servant girl in a hundred had any
appreciable commonsense.  And when girls happened to be "upset"--as they
were all liable to be, and as Ada by the violent departure of the cook
no doubt was--even such minute traces of gumption as they possessed were
apt to disappear.

"There’s no pleasing you, m’m!" said Ada.  "The way you talked to me in
the kitchen, saying I was always a-hiding things from ye.  I’ve felt it
very much!"

She threw her head back, and the gesture signified: "I’m younger than
you, and young men are always running after me.  And I can get a new
situation any time.  And I’ve not gone back into my kitchen to put my
cap and apron on."

"Ada," said Hilda.  "Shall I tell you what’s wrong with you?  You’re a
little fool.  You know you’re talking rightdown nonsense.  You know that
as well as I do.  And you know you’ll never get a better place than you
have here.  But you’ve taken an idea into your head--and there you are!
Now do be sensible. You say you think you’d better give notice.  Think
it over before you do anything ridiculous.  Sleep on it.  We’ll see how
you feel in the morning."

"I think I’d better give notice, m’m, especially seeing I’m a fool, and
silly," Ada persisted.

Hilda sighed.  Her voice hardened slightly:

"So you’d leave me without a maid just at Christmas! And that’s all the
thanks I get for all I’ve done for you."

"Well, m’m.  We’ve had such a queer lot of girls here lately, haven’t
we?"  The pertness was intensified.  "I don’t hardly care to stay.  I
feel we sh’d both be better for a change like."

It was perhaps Ada’s subtly insolent use of the word "we" and "both"
that definitely brought about a new phase of the interview.  Hilda
suddenly lost all desire for an amicable examination of the crisis.

"Very well, Ada," she said, shortly.  "But remember I shan’t take you
back again, whatever happens."

Ada moved away, and then returned.

"Could I leave at once, m’m, same as cook?"

Hilda was astonished and outraged, despite all her experience and its
resulting secret sardonic cynicism in regard to servants.  The girl was
ready to walk out instantly.

"And may I enquire where you’d go to?" asked Hilda with a sneer.  "At
this time of night you couldn’t possibly get home to your parents."

"Oh!" answered Ada brightly.  "I could go to me cousin’s up at Toft End.
And her could send down a lad with a barrow for me box."

The plot, then, had been thought out.  "Her cousin’s!" thought Hilda,
and seemed to be putting her finger on the cause of Ada’s disloyalty.
"Her cousin’s!"  It was a light in a dark mystery.  "Her cousin’s!"

"I suppose you know you’re forfeiting the wages due to you the day after
to-morrow?"

"I shall ask me cousin about that, m’m," said Ada, as it were
menacingly.

"I should!" Hilda sarcastically agreed.  "I certainly should."  And she
thought with bitter resignation: "She’ll have to leave anyhow after
this.  She may as well leave on the spot."

"There’s those as’ll see as I have me rights," said Ada pugnaciously,
with another toss of the head.

Hilda had a mind to retort in anger; but she controlled herself.
Already that afternoon she had imperilled her dignity in the altercation
with the cook. The cook, however, had not Ada’s ready tongue, and, while
the mistress had come off best against the cook, she might through
impulsiveness find herself worsted by Ada’s more youthful impudence,
were it once unloosed.

"That will do, then, Ada," she said.  "You can go and pack your box
first thing."

In less than three quarters of an hour Ada was gone, and her corded
trunk lay just within the scullery door, waiting the arrival of the
cousin’s barrow. She had bumped it down the stairs herself.

All solitary in the house, which had somehow been transformed into a
strange and unusual house, Hilda wept.  She had only parted with an
unfaithful and ungrateful servant, but she wept.  She dashed into the
kitchen and began to do Ada’s work, still weeping, and she was savage
against her own tears; yet they continued softly to fall, misting her
vision of fire and utensils and earthenware vessels.  Ada had left
everything in a moment; she had left the kettle on the fire, and the
grease in the square tin in which the dinner-joint had been cooked, and
the ashes in the fender, and tea-leaves in the kitchen teapot and a cup
and saucer unwashed.  She had cared naught for the inconvenience she was
causing; had shewn not the slightest consideration; had walked off
without a pang, smilingly hoity-toity.  And all servants were like that.
Such conduct might be due as much to want of imagination, to a simple
inability to picture to themselves the consequences of certain acts, as
to stark ingratitude; but the consequences remained the same; and Hilda
held fiercely to the theory of stark ingratitude.

She had made Ada; she had created her.  When Hilda engaged her, Ada was
little more than an "oat-cake girl,"--that is to say, one of those girls
who earn a few pence by delivering oat-cakes fresh from the stove at a
halfpenny each before breakfast at the houses of gormandising superior
artisans and the middle-classes. True, she had been in one situation
prior to Hilda’s, but it was a situation where she learnt nothing and
could have learnt nothing.  Nevertheless, she was very quick to learn,
and in a month Hilda had done wonders with her.  She had taught her not
only her duties, but how to respect herself, to make the best of
herself, and favourably to impress others. She had enormously increased
Ada’s value in the universe.  And she had taught her some worldly
wisdom, and permitted and even encouraged certain coquetries, and in the
bed-room during dressings and undressings had occasionally treated her
as a soubrette if not as a confidante; had listened to her at length,
and had gone so far as to ask her views on this matter or that--the
supreme honour for a menial.  Also she had very conscientiously nursed
her in sickness.  She had really liked Ada, and had developed a
sentimental weakness for her.  She had taken pleasure in her prettiness,
in her natural grace, and in her crude youth.  She enjoyed seeing Ada
arrange a bedroom, or answer the door, or serve a meal.  And Ada’s
stupidity--that half-cunning stupidity of her class, which immovably
underlay her superficial aptitudes--had not sufficed to spoil her
affection for the girl.  She had been indulgent to Ada’s stupidity; she
had occasionally in some soft moods hoped that it was curable.  And she
had argued in moments of discouragement that at any rate stupidity could
be faithful.  In her heart she had counted Ada as a friend, as a true
standby in the more or less tragic emergencies of the household.  And
now Ada had deserted her.  Stupidity had proved to be neither faithful
nor grateful.  Why had Ada been so silly and so base?  Impossible to
say!  A nothing! A whim!  Nerves!  Fatuity!  The whole affair was
horribly absurd.  These creatures were incalculable. Of course Hilda
would have been wiser not to upbraid her so soon after the scene with
the cook, and to have spoken more smoothly to the chit in the boudoir.
Hilda admitted that.  But what then?  Was that an excuse for the chit’s
turpitude?  There must be a limit to the mistress’s humouring.  And
probably after all the chit had meant to go....  If she had not meant to
go she would not have entered the boudoir apronless and capless.  Some
rankling word, some ridiculous sympathy with the cook, some wild dream
of a Christmas holiday--who could tell what might have influenced her?
Hilda gave it up--and returned to it a thousand times.  One truth
emerged--and it was the great truth of housemistresses--namely, that it
never, never, never pays to be too kind to servants. "Servants do not
understand kindness."  You think they do; they themselves think they do;
but they don’t,--they don’t and they don’t.  Hilda went back into the
immensity of her desolating experience as an employer of female domestic
servants of all kinds, but chiefly bad--for the landlady of a small
boarding house must take what servants she can get--and she raged at the
persistence of the proof that kindness never paid. What did pay was
severity and inhuman strictness, and the maintenance of an impassable
gulf between employer and employed.  Not again would she make the
mistake which she had made a hundred times.  She hardened herself to the
consistency of a slave-driver. And all the time it was the woman in her,
not the mistress, that the hasty thoughtless Ada had wounded. To the
woman the kitchen was not the same place without Ada--Ada on whom she
had utterly relied in the dilemma caused by the departure of the cook.
As with angrily wet eyes she went about her new work in the kitchen, she
could almost see the graceful ghost of Ada tripping to and fro therein.

And all that the world, and the husband, would know or understand was
that a cook had been turned out for drunkenness, and that a quite sober
parlour-maid had most preposterously walked after her.  Hilda was aware
that in Edwin she had a severe, though a taciturn, critic of her
activities as employer of servants.  She had no hope whatever of his
sympathy, and so she closed all her gates against him.  She waited for
him as for an adversary, and all the lustre faded from her conception of
their love.

When Edwin approached his home that frosty evening, he was disturbed to
perceive that there was no light from the hall-gas shining through the
panes of the front-door, though some light showed at the dining-room
window, the blinds of which had not been drawn.  "What next?" he thought
crossly.  He was tired, and the keenness of the weather, instead of
bracing him, merely made him petulant.  He was astonished that several
women in a house could all forget such an important act as the lighting
of the hall-gas at nightfall.  Never before had the hall-gas been
forgotten, and the negligence appeared to Edwin as absolutely monstrous.
The effect of it on the street, the effect on a possible caller, was bad
enough (Edwin, while pretending to scorn social opinion, was really very
deferential towards it), but what was worse was the revelation of the
feminine mentality.

In opening the door with his latchkey he was purposely noisy, partly in
order to give expression to his justified annoyance, and partly to warn
all peccant women that the male had arrived, threatening.

As his feet fumbled into the interior gloom and he banged the door, he
quite expected a rush of at least one apologetic woman with a box of
matches.  But nobody came.  Nevertheless he could hear sharp movements
through the half-open door of the kitchen. Assuredly women had the
irresponsibility of infants.  He glanced for an instant into the
dining-room; the white cloth was laid, but the table was actually not
set. With unusual righteous care he wiped the half-congealed mud off his
boots on the mat; then removed his hat and his overcoat, took a large
new piece of indiarubher from his pocket and put it on the hall-table,
felt the radiator (which despite all his injunctions and recommendations
was almost cold); and lastly he lighted the gas himself.  This final act
was contrary to his own rule, for he had often told Hilda that half her
trouble with servants arose through her impatiently doing herself things
which they had omitted, instead of ringing the bell and seeing the
things done. But he was not infrequently inconsistent, both in deed and
in thought.  For another example, he would say superiorly that a woman
could never manage women, ignoring that he the all-wise had never been
able to manage Hilda.

He turned to go upstairs.  At the same moment somebody emerged obscurely
from the kitchen.  It was Hilda, in a white apron.

"Oh!  I’m glad you’ve lighted it," said she curtly, without the least
symptom of apology, but rather affrontingly.

He continued his way.

"Have you seen anything of George?" she asked, and her tone stopped him.

Yet she well knew that he hated to be stopped of an evening on his way
to the bathroom.  It could not be sufficiently emphasized that to accost
him before he had descended from the bathroom was to transgress one of
the most solemn rules of his daily life.

"Of course I haven’t seen George," he answered. "How should I have seen
George?"

"Because he’s not back from school yet, and I can’t help wondering----"

She was worrying about George as usual.

He grunted and passed on.

"There’s no light on the landing, either," he said, over the banisters.
"I wish you’d see to those servants of yours."

"As it happens there aren’t any servants."

Her tone, getting more peculiar with each phrase, stopped him again.

"Aren’t any servants?  What d’you mean?"

"Well, I found the attic full of beer bottles, so I sent her off on the
spot."

"Sent who off?"

"Eliza."

"And where’s Ada?"

"She’s gone too," said Hilda defiantly, and as though rebutting an
accusation before it could be made.

"Why?"

"She seemed to want to.  And she was very impertinent over it."

He snorted and shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, it’s your affair," he muttered, too scornful to ask details.

"It is," said she, significantly laconic.

In the bathroom, vexed and gloomy as he brushed his nails and splashed
in the wash basin, he mused savagely over the servant problem.  The
servant problem had been growing acute.  He had predicted several times
that a crisis would arrive; a crisis had arrived; he was always right;
his rightness was positively uncanny.  He had liked Ada; he had not
disliked the cook.  He knew that Hilda was to blame.  How should she not
be to blame,--losing her entire staff in one afternoon?  It was not
merely that she lacked the gift of authoritative control,--it was also
that she had no feeling for democratic justice as between one human
being and another.  And yet among his earliest recollections of her was
her passionate sympathy with men on strike as against their employers.
Totally misleading manifestations!  For her a servant was nothing but a
"servant."  She was convinced that all her servants were pampered and
spoilt; and as for Edwin’s treatment of his workpeople she considered it
to be ridiculously, criminally soft.  If she had implied once she had
implied a hundred times that the whole lot of them laughed at him behind
his back for a sentimental simpleton.  Occasionally Edwin was quite
outraged by her callousness.  The topic of the eight-hours day, of the
ten-hours day, and even of the twelve-hours day (the last for
tramwaymen) had been lately exciting the district.  And Edwin was
distressed that in his own house a sixteen-hour day for labour was in
vogue and that the employer perceived no shame in it.  He did not
clearly see how the shame was to be abolished, but he thought that it
ought to be admitted.  It was not admitted.  From six in the morning
until ten at night these mysterious light-headed young women were the
slaves of a bell.  They had no surcease except one long weekday evening
each week and a short Sunday evening each fortnight.  At one period
Hilda had had a fad for getting them out of bed at half-past five, to
cure them of laziness.  He remembered one cook whose family lived at the
village of Brindley Edge, five miles off.  This cook on her weekday
evening would walk to Brindley Edge, spend three quarters of an hour in
her home, and walk back to Bursley, reaching Trafalgar Road just in time
to get to bed.  Hilda saw nothing very odd in that.  She said the girl
could always please herself about going to Brindley Edge.

Edwin’s democratic sense was gradually growing in force; it disturbed
more and more the peace of his inmost mind.  He seldom displayed his
sympathies (save to Tertius Ingpen who, though a Tory, was in some ways
astoundingly open to ideas, which seemed to interest him as a pretty
equation would interest him), but they pursued their secret activity in
his being, annoying him at his lithographic works, and still more in his
home.  He would suppress them, and grin, and repeat his ancient
consoling truth that what was, was. The relief, however, was not
permanent.

In that year the discovery of Rontgen Rays, the practical invention of
the incandescent gas-mantle, the abolition of the man with the red flag
in front of self-propelled vehicles, and the fact that Consols stood at
113, had combined to produce in innumerable hearts the illusion that
civilisation was advancing at a great rate.  But Edwin in his soul
scarcely thought so.  He was worrying not only about Liberal principles,
but about the world; in his youth he had never worried about the world.
And of his own personal success he would ask and ask: Is it right?  He
said to himself in the bathroom: "There’s a million domestic servants in
this blessed country, and not one of them works less than a hundred
hours a week, and nobody cares.  I don’t think I really care myself.
But there it is all the same!"  And he was darkly resentful against
Hilda on account of the entire phenomenon.... He foresaw, too, a period
of upset and discomfort in his house.  Would there, indeed, ever be any
real tranquillity in his house, with that strange, primeval cave-woman
in charge of it?

As he descended the stairs, Hilda came out of the dining-room with an
empty tray.

She said:

"I wish you’d go out and look for George."

Imagine it--going out into the Five Towns to look for one boy!

"Oh!  He’ll be all right.  I suppose you haven’t forgotten Ingpen’s
coming to-night."

"Of course I haven’t.  But I want you to go out and look for George."

He knew what was in her mind,--namely an absurd vision of George and his
new bicycle crushed under a tramcar somewhere between Bleakridge and
Hanbridge.  In that year everybody with any pretension to youthfulness
and modernity rode a bicycle.  Both Edwin and Hilda rode
occasionally--such was the power of fashion.  Maternal apprehensions had
not sufficed to keep George from having a bicycle, nor from riding on it
unprotected up and down the greasy slopes of Trafalgar Road to and from
school.  Edwin himself had bought the bicycle, pooh-poohing danger, and
asserting that anyhow normal risks must always be accepted with an even
mind.

He was about to declare that he would certainly not do anything so silly
as to go out and look for George,--and then all of a sudden he had the
queer sensation of being alone with Hilda in the house made strange and
romantic by a domestic calamity.  He gazed at Hilda with her apron, and
the calamity had made her strange and romantic also.  He was vexed,
annoyed, despondent, gloomy, fearful of the immediate future; he had
immense grievances; he hated Hilda, he loathed giving way to her.  He
thought: "What is it binds me to this incomprehensible woman?  I will
not be bound!"  But he felt that he would be compelled (not by her but
by something in himself) to commit the folly of going out to look for
George.  And he felt that though his existence was an exasperating
adventure, still it was an adventure.

"Oh!  Damn!" he exploded, and reached for a cap.

And then George came into the hall through the kitchen.  The boy often
preferred to enter by the back, the stalking Indian way.

                                   IV

George wore spectacles.  He had grown considerably. He was now between
fourteen and fifteen years of age, and he had begun to look his age.
His mental outlook and conversation were on the whole in advance of his
age.  Even when he was younger he had frequently an adult manner of wise
talking, but it had appeared unreal, naïve,--it was amusing rather than
convincing.  Now he imposed himself even on his family as a genuine
adolescent, though the idiom he employed was often schoolboyish and his
gestures were immaturely rough.  The fact was he was not the same boy.
Everybody noticed it.  His old charm and delicacy seemed to have gone,
and his voice was going.  He had become harsh, defiant, somewhat brutal,
and egotistic if not conceited.  He held a very low opinion of all his
school-fellows, and did not conceal it.  Yet he was not very high in his
form (the lower fifth); his reports were mediocre; and he cut no figure
in the playfield.  In the home he was charged with idleness,
selfishness, and irresolution.  It was pointed out to him that he was
not making the best of his gifts, and that if he only chose to make the
best of them he might easily, etc., etc.  Apparently he did not care a
bit.  He had marked facility on the piano, but he had insisted on giving
up his piano lessons and would not open the piano for a fortnight at a
time.  He still maintained his intention of being an architect, but he
had ceased to show any interest in architecture.  He would, however,
still paint in water-colours; and he read a lot, but gluttonously,
without taste.  Edwin and Hilda, and especially Hilda, did not hide
their discontent.  Hilda had outbursts against him.  In regard to Hilda
he was disobedient. Edwin always spoke quietly to him, and was seldom
seriously disobeyed.  When disobeyed Edwin would show a taciturn
resentment against the boy, who would sulk and then melt.

"Oh!  He’ll grow out of it," Edwin would say to Hilda, yet Edwin, like
Hilda, thought that the boy was deliberately naughty, and they held
themselves towards him as grieved persons of superior righteousness
towards a person of inferior righteousness.  Not even Edwin reflected
that profound molecular changes might be proceeding in George’s brain,
for which changes he was in no way responsible.  Nevertheless, despite
the blighting disappointment of George’s evolution, the home was by no
means deeply engloomed. No!  George had an appealing smile, a mere gawky
boyishness, a peculiar way of existing, that somehow made joy in the
home.  Also he was a centre of intense and continual interest, and of
this he was very well aware.

In passing through the kitchen George had of course been struck by the
astounding absence of the cook; he had noticed further a fancy apron and
a cap lying on the window sill therein.  And when he came into the hall,
the strange aspect of his mother (in a servant’s apron) and his uncle
proved to him that something marvellously unusual, exciting, and
uplifting was afoot.  He was pleased, agog, and he had the additional
satisfaction that great events would conveniently divert attention from
his lateness.  Still he must be discreet, for the adults were evidently
at loggerheads, and therefore touchy.  He slipped between Edwin and
Hilda with a fairly good imitation of innocent casualness, as if saying:
"Whatever has occurred, I am guiltless, and going on just as usual."

"Ooh!  Bags I!" he exclaimed loudly, at the hall-table, and seized the
indiarubber, which Edwin had promised him.  His school vocabulary
comprised an extraordinary number of words ending in _gs_.  He would
never, for example, say "first," but "foggs"; and never "second," but
"seggs."  That very morning, for example, meeting Hilda on the mat at
the foot of the stairs, he had shocked her by saying: "You go up foggs,
mother, and I’ll go seggs."

"George!" Hilda severely protested.  Her anxiety concerning him was now
turned into resentment. "Have you had an accident?"

"An accident?" said George, as though at a loss. Yet he knew perfectly
that his mother was referring to the bicycle.

Edwin said curtly:

"Now, don’t play the fool.  Have you fallen off your bike?  Look at your
overcoat.  Don’t leave that satchel there, and hang your coat up
properly."

The overcoat was in a grievous state.  A few days earlier it had been
new.  Besides money, it had cost an enormous amount of deliberation and
discussion, like everything else connected with George.  Against his
will, Edwin himself had been compelled to conduct George to Shillitoe’s,
the tailor’s, and superintend a third trying-on, for further
alterations, after the overcoat was supposed to be finished.  And lo,
now it had no quality left but warmth!  Efforts in regard to George were
always thus out of proportion to the trifling results obtained.  At
George’s age Edwin doubtless had an overcoat, but he positively could
not remember having one, and he was quite sure that no schoolboy
overcoat of his had ever preoccupied a whole household for two minutes,
to say nothing of a week.

George’s face expressed a sense of injury, and his face hardened.

"Mother made me take my overcoat.  You know I can’t cycle in my
overcoat.  I’ve not been on my bicycle all day.  Also my lamp’s broken,"
he said, with gloomy defiance.

His curiosity about wondrous events in the house was quenched.

And Edwin felt angry with Hilda for having quite unjustifiably assumed
that George had gone to school on his bicycle.  Ought she not to have
had the ordinary gumption to assure herself, before worrying, that the
lad’s bicycle was not in the shed?  Incredible thoughtlessness!  All
these alarms for nothing!

"Then why are you so late?" Hilda demanded, diverting to George her
indignation at Edwin’s unuttered but yet conveyed criticism of herself.

"Kept in."

"All this time?" Hilda questioned, suspiciously.

George sullenly nodded.

"What for?"

"Latin."

"Homework?  Again?" ejaculated Edwin.  "Why hadn’t you done it
properly?"

"I had a headache last night.  And I’ve got one to-day."

"Another of your Latin headaches!" said Edwin sarcastically.  There was
nothing, except possibly cod liver oil, that George detested more than
Edwin’s serious sarcasm.

The elders glanced at one another and glanced away.  Both had the same
fear--the dreadful fear that George might be developing the worse
characteristics of his father.  Both had vividly in mind the fact that
this boy was the son of George Cannon.  They never mentioned to each
other either the fear or the fact; they dared not.  But each knew the
thoughts of the other.  The boy was undoubtedly crafty; he could conceal
subtle designs under a simple exterior; he was also undoubtedly
secretive.  The recent changes in his disposition had put Edwin and
Hilda on their guard, and every time young George displayed cunning, or
economised the truth, or lied, the fear visited them. "I hope he’ll turn
out all right!" Hilda had said once. Edwin had nearly replied: "What are
you worrying about?  The sons of honest men are often rascals. Why on
earth shouldn’t the son of a rascal be an honest man?"  But he had only
said, with good-humoured impatience: "Of course he’ll turn out all
right!"  Not that he himself was convinced.

Edwin now attacked the boy gloomily:

"You didn’t seem to have much of a headache when you came in just now."

It was true.

But George suddenly burst into tears.  His headaches were absolutely
genuine.  The emptiness of the kitchen and the general queer look of
things in the house had, however, by their promise of adventurous
happenings, caused him to forget his headache altogether, and the
discovery of the new indiarubber had been like a tonic to a
convalescent.  The menacing attitude of the elders had now brought about
a relapse. The headache established itself as his chief physical
sensation.  His chief moral sensation was that of a terrible grievance.
He did not often cry; he had not indeed cried for about a year.  But
to-night there was something nervous in the very air, and the sob took
him unawares.  The first sob having prostrated all resistance, others
followed victoriously, and there was no stopping them.  He did not quite
know why he should have been more liable to cry on this particular
occasion than on certain others, and he was rather ashamed; on the other
hand it was with an almost malicious satisfaction that he perceived the
troubling effect of his tears on the elders.  They were obviously in a
quandary.  Serve them right!

"It’s my eyes," he blubbered.  "I told you these specs would never suit
me.  But you wouldn’t believe me, and the headmaster won’t believe me."

The discovery that George’s eyesight was defective, about two months
earlier, had led to a desperate but of course hopeless struggle on his
part against the wearing of spectacles.  It was curious that in the
struggle he had never even mentioned his strongest objection to
spectacles,--namely, the fact that Bert Benbow wore spectacles.

"Why didn’t you tell us?" Edwin demanded.

Between sobs George replied with overwhelming disillusioned disgust:

"What’s the good of telling you anything?  You only think I’m codding."

And he passed upstairs, apparently the broken victim of fate and
parents, but in reality triumphant. His triumph was such that neither
Edwin nor Hilda dared even to protest against the use of such an
inexcusable word as ’codding.’

Hilda went into the kitchen, and Edwin rather aimlessly followed her.
He felt incompetent.  He could do nothing except carry trays, and he had
no desire to carry trays.  Neither spoke.  Hilda was bending over the
fire, then she arranged the grid in front of the fire to hold a tin, and
she greased the tin.  He thought she looked very wistful, for all the
somewhat bitter sturdiness of her demeanour.  Tertius Ingpen was due for
the evening; she had no servants--through her own fault; and now a new
phase had arrived in the unending responsibility for George’s welfare.
He knew that she was blaming him on account of George. He knew that she
believed in the sincerity of George’s outburst; he believed in it
himself.  The spectacles were wrong; the headache was genuine.  And he,
Edwin, was guilty of the spectacles because he had forced Hilda, by his
calm bantering commonsense, to consult a small local optician of good
reputation.

Hilda had wanted to go to Birmingham or Manchester; but Edwin said that
such an idea was absurd.  The best local optician was good enough for
the great majority of the inhabitants of the Five Towns and would be
good enough for George.  Why not indeed?  Why the craze for specialists?
There could be nothing uniquely wrong with the boy’s eyes,--it was a
temporary weakness.  And so on and so on, in accordance with Edwin’s
instinct for denying the existence of a crisis.  And the local optician,
consulted, had borne him out.  The local optician said that every year
he dealt with dozens of cases similar to George’s.  And now both the
local optician and Edwin were overthrown by a boy’s sobbing tears.

Suddenly Hilda turned round upon her husband.

"I shall take George to London to-morrow about his eyes," she said, with
immense purpose and sincerity, in a kind of fierce challenge.

This was her amends to George for having often disbelieved him, and for
having suspected him of taking after his father.  She made her amends
passionately, and with all the force of her temperament.  In her eyes
George was now a martyr.

"To London?" exclaimed Edwin weakly.

"Yes.  It’s no use half doing these things.  I shall ask Charlie
Orgreave to recommend me a first-class oculist."

Edwin dared say nothing.  Either Manchester or Birmingham would have
been just as good as London, perhaps better.  Moreover, she had not even
consulted him.  She had decided by a violent impulse and announced her
decision.  This was not right; she would have protested against a
similar act by Edwin.  But he could not argue with her.  She was far
beyond argument.

"I wouldn’t have that boy’s eyesight played with for anything!" she said
fiercely.

"Well, of course you wouldn’t!  Who would?" Edwin thought, but he did
not say it.

"Go and see what he’s doing," she said.

Edwin slouched off.  He was no longer the master of the house.  He was
only an economic factor and general tool in the house.  And as he
wandered like a culprit up the stairs of the mysteriously transformed
dwelling he thought again: "What is it that binds me to her?"  But he
was abashed and in spite of himself impressed by the intensity of
Hilda’s formidable emotion.  Nevertheless as he began vaguely to
perceive all that was involved in her threat to go to London on the
morrow, he stiffened, and said to himself: "We shall see about that.  We
shall just see about that!"

                                   V

They were at the meal.  Hilda had covered George’s portion of fish with
a plate and put it before the fire to keep warm.  She was just returning
to the table. Tertius Ingpen, who sat with his back to the fire, looked
at her over his shoulder with an admiring smile and said:

"Well, I’ve had some good meals in this house, but this is certainly the
best bit of fish I ever tasted.  So that the catastrophe in the kitchen
leaves me unmoved."

Hilda, with face suddenly transformed by a responsive smile, insinuated
herself between the table and her arm-chair, drew forward the chair by
its arms, and sat down.  Her keen pleasure in the compliment was
obvious.  Edwin noted that the meal was really very well served, the
table brighter than usual, the toast crisper, and the fish--a fine piece
of hake white as snow within its browned exterior--merely perfect. There
was no doubt that Hilda could be extremely efficient when she desired;
Edwin’s criticism was that she was too often negligent, and that in her
moods of conscientiousness she gave herself too urgently and completely,
producing an unnecessary disturbance in the atmosphere of the home.
Nevertheless Edwin too felt pleasure in the compliment to Hilda; and he
calmly enjoyed the spectacle of his wife and his friend side by side on
such mutually appreciative terms.  The intimacy of the illuminated table
in the midst of the darker room, the warmth and crackling of the fire,
the grave solidity of the furniture, the springiness of the thick
carpet, and the delicate odours of the repast,--all these things
satisfied in him something that was profound.  And the two mature,
vivacious, intelligent faces under the shaded gas excited his loyal
affection.

"That’s right," Hilda murmured, in her clear enunciation.  "I do like
praise!"

"Now then, you callous brute," said Ingpen to Edwin.  "What do you say?"

And Hilda cried with swift, complaining sincerity:

"Oh!  Edwin never praises me!"

Her sincerity convinced by its very artlessness.  The complaint had come
unsought from her heart.  And it was so spontaneous and forcible that
Tertius Ingpen, as a tactful guest, saw the advisability of easing the
situation by laughter.

"Yes, I do!" Edwin protested, and though he was shocked, he laughed, in
obedience to Ingpen’s cue.  It was true; he did praise her; but not
frequently, and almost always in order to flatter her rather than to
express his own emotion.  Edwin did not care for praising people; he
would enthusiastically praise a book, but not a human being.  His way
was to take efficiency for granted.  "Not so bad," was a superlative of
laudation with him.  He was now shocked as much by the girl’s outrageous
candour as by the indisputable revelation that she went hungry for
praise.  Even to a close friend such as Ingpen, surely a wife had not
the right to be quite so desperately sincere.  Edwin considered that in
the presence of a third person husband and wife should always at any
cost maintain the convention of perfect conjugal amenity.  He knew
couples who achieved the feat,--Albert and Clara, for example.  But
Hilda, he surmised, had other ideas, if indeed she had ever consciously
reflected upon this branch of social demeanour.  Certainly she seemed at
moments to lose all regard for appearances.

Moreover, she was polluting by acerbity the pure friendliness of the
atmosphere, and endangering cheer.

"He’s too wrapped up in the works to think about praising his wife,"
Hilda continued, still in the disconcerting vein of sincerity, but with
less violence and a more philosophical air.  The fact was that, although
she had not regained the zest of the mood so rudely dissipated by the
scene with Ada, she was kept cheerful by the mere successful exercise of
her own energy in proving to these two men that servants were not in the
least essential to the continuance of plenary comfort in her house; and
she somewhat condescended towards Edwin.

"By the way, Teddie," said Ingpen, pulling lightly at his short beard,
"I heard a rumour that you were going to stand for the Town Council in
the South ward.  Why didn’t you?"

Edwin looked a little confused.

"Who told you that tale?"

"It was about."

"It never came from me," said Edwin.

Hilda broke in eagerly:

"He was invited to stand.  But he wouldn’t.  I thought he ought to.  I
begged him to.  But no, he wouldn’t.  And did you know he refused a
J.P.ship too?"

"Oh!" mumbled Edwin.  "That sort o’ thing’s not my line."

"Oh, isn’t it!" Ingpen exclaimed.  "Then whose line is it?"

"Look at all the rotters in the Council!" said Edwin.

"All the more reason why you should be on it!"

"Well, I’ve got no time," Edwin finished gloomily and uneasily.

Ingpen paused, tapping his teeth with his finger, before proceeding, in
a judicial, thoughtful manner which in recent years he had been
developing:

"I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you, old man. You don’t know it,
but you’re in a groove.  You go about like a shuttle from the house to
the works and the works to the house.  And you never think beyond the
works and the house."

"Oh, don’t I?"

Ingpen went placidly on:

"No, you don’t.  You’ve become a good specimen of the genus
’domesticated business man.’  You’ve forgotten what life is.  You fancy
you’re at full stretch all the time, but you’re in a coma.  I suppose
you’ll never see forty again--and have you ever been outside this
island?  You went to Llandudno this year because you went last year.
And you’ll go next year because you went this year.  If you happen now
and then to worry about the failure of your confounded Liberal Party you
think you’re a blooming broad-minded publicist.  Where are your musical
evenings?  When I asked you to go with me to a concert at Manchester
last week but one, you thought I’d gone dotty, simply because it meant
your leaving the works early and not getting to bed until the
unheard-of-time of one thirty a.m."

"I was never told anything about any concert," Hilda interjected
sharply.

"Go on!  Go on!" said Edwin raising his eyebrows.

"I will," said Ingpen with tranquillity, as though discussing
impartially and impersonally the conduct of some individual at the
Antipodes.  "Where am I? Well, you’re always buying books, and I believe
you reckon yourself a bit of a reader.  What d’you get out of them?  I
daresay you’ve got decided views on the transcendent question whether
Emily Brontë was a greater writer than Charlotte.  That’s about what
you’ve got.  Why, dash it, you haven’t a vice left.  A vice would
interfere with your lovely litho.  There’s only one thing that would
upset you more than a machinery breakdown at the works----"

"And what’s that?"

"What’s that?  If one of the hinges of your garden-gate came off, or you
lost your latchkey!  Why, just look how you’ve evidently been struck all
of a heap by this servant affair!  I expect it occurred to you your
breakfast might be five minutes late in the morning."

"Stuff!" said Edwin, amiably.  He regarded Ingpen’s observations as
fantastically unjust and beside the mark.  But his sense of fairness and
his admiration of the man’s intellectual honesty would not allow him to
resent them.  Ingpen would discuss and dissect either his friends or
himself with equal detachment; the detachment was complete.  And his
assumption that his friends fully shared his own dispassionate, curious
interest in arriving at the truth appealed very strongly to Edwin’s
loyalty.  That Ingpen was liable to preach and even to hector was a
drawback which he silently accepted.

"Struck all of a heap indeed!" muttered Edwin.

"Wasn’t he, Hilda?"

"I should just say he was!  And I know he thinks it’s all my fault,"
said Hilda.

Tertius Ingpen glanced at her an instant, and gave a short half-cynical
laugh, which scarcely concealed his mild scorn of her feminine confusion
of the argument.

"It’s the usual thing!" said Ingpen, with scorn still more marked.  At
this stage of a dissertation he was inclined to be less a human being
than the trumpet of a sacred message.  "It’s the usual thing!  I never
knew a happy marriage yet that didn’t end in the same way."  Then,
perceiving that he was growing too earnest, and that his emphasis on the
phrase ’happy marriage’ had possibly been too sarcastic, he sniggered.

"I really don’t see what marriage has to do with it," said Hilda,
frowning.

"No, of course you don’t," Ingpen agreed.

"If you’d said business----" she added.

"Now we’ve had the diagnosis," Edwin sardonically remarked, looking at
his plate, "what’s the prescription?"  He was reflecting: "’Happy
marriage,’ does he call it! ... Why on earth does she say I think it’s
all her fault?  I’ve not breathed a word."

"Well," replied Ingpen.  "You live much too close to your infernal
works.  Why don’t you get away, right away, and live out in the country
like a sensible man, instead of sticking in this filthy hole--among all
these new cottages? ... Barbarian hordes...."

"Oh!  Hurrah!" cried Hilda.  "At last I’ve got somebody who takes my
side."

"Of course you say it’s impossible.  You naturally would----" Ingpen
resumed.

He was interrupted by the entrance of George.  Soon after Tertius
Ingpen’s arrival, George had been despatched to summon urgently Mrs.
Tams, the charwoman who had already more than once helped to fill a
hiatus between two cooks.  George showed now no trace of his late
martyrdom, nor of a headache.  To conquer George in these latter days
you had to demand of him a service.  It was Edwin who had first
discovered the intensity of the boy’s desire to take a useful share in
any adult operation whatever.  He came in red-cheeked, red-handed,
rough, defiant, shy, proud, and making a low intermittent "Oo-oo" noise
with protruding lips to indicate the sharpness of the frost outside.  As
he had already greeted Ingpen he was able to go without ceremony
straight to his chair.

Confidentially, in the silence, Hilda raised her eyebrows to him
interrogatively.  In reply he gave one short nod.  Thus in two scarcely
perceptible gestures the assurance was asked for and given that the
mission had been successful and that Mrs. Tams would be coming up at
once.  George loved these private and laconic signallings, which
produced in him the illusion that he was getting nearer to the enigma of
life.

As he persisted in the "Oo-oo" manifestation, Hilda amicably murmured:

"Hsh-hsh!"

George pressed his lips swiftly and hermetically together, and raised
his eyebrows in protest against his own indecorum.  He glanced at his
empty place; whereupon Hilda glanced informingly in the direction of the
fire, and George, skilled in the interpretation of minute signs, skirted
stealthily round the table behind his mother’s chair, and snatched his
loaded plate from the hearth.

Nobody said a word.  The sudden stoppage of the conversation had indeed
caused a slight awkwardness among the elders.  George, for his part, was
quite convinced that they had been discussing his eyesight.

"Furnace all right again, sonny?" asked Edwin, quietly, when the boy had
sat down.  Hilda was replenishing Ingpen’s plate.

"Blop!" muttered George, springing up aghast.  This meant that he had
forgotten the furnace in the cellar, source of heat to the radiator in
the hall.  By a recent arrangement he received sixpence a week for
stoking the furnace.

"Never mind!  It’ll do afterwards," said Edwin.

But George, masticating fish, shook his head.  He must be stern with
himself, possibly to atone for his tears.  And he went off instantly to
the cellar.

"Bit chill," observed Edwin to him as he left the room.  "A bit chilly"
was what he meant; but George delighted to chip the end off a word, and
when Edwin chose to adopt the same practice, the boy took it as a
masonic sign of profound understanding between them.

George nodded and vanished.  And both Edwin and Hilda dwelt in secret
upon his boyish charm, and affectionate satisfaction mingled with and
softened their apprehensions and their brooding responsibility and
remorse.  They thought: "He is simply exquisite," and in their hearts
apologised to him.

Tertius Ingpen asked suddenly:

"What’s happened to the young man’s spectacles?"

"They don’t suit him," said Hilda eagerly.  "They don’t suit him at all.
They give him headaches. Edwin would have me take him to the local man,
what’s-his-name at Hanbridge.  I was afraid it would be risky, but Edwin
would have it.  I’m going to take him to London to-morrow.  He’s been
having headaches for some time and never said a word.  I only found it
out by accident."

"Surely," Ingpen smiled, "it’s contrary to George’s usual practice to
hide his troubles like that, isn’t it?"

"Oh!" said Hilda.  "He’s rather secretive, you know."

"I’ve never noticed," said Ingpen, "that he was more secretive than most
of us are about a grievance."

Edwin, secretly agitated, said in a curious light tone:

"If you ask me, he kept it quiet just to pay us out."

"Pay you out?  What for?"

"For making him wear spectacles at all.  These kids want a deuce of a
lot of understanding; but that’s my contribution.  He simply said to
himself: ’Well, if they think they’re going to cure my eyesight for me
with their beastly specs they just aren’t, and I won’t tell ’em!’"

"Edwin!" Hilda protested warmly.  "I wonder you can talk like that!"

Tertius Ingpen went off into one of his peculiar long fits of laughter;
and Edwin quizzically smiled, feeling as if he was repaying Hilda for
her unnecessary insistence upon the fact that he was responsible for the
choosing of an optician.  Hilda, suspecting that the two men saw
something droll which was hidden from her, blushed and then laughed in
turn, somewhat self-consciously.

"Don’t _you_ think it’s best to go to London, about an affair like
eyesight?" she asked Ingpen pointedly.

"The chief thing in these cases," said Ingpen solemnly, "is to satisfy
the maternal instinct.  Yes, I should certainly go to London.  If Teddie
disagrees, I’m against him.  Who are you going to?"

"You are horrid!" Hilda exclaimed, and added with positiveness: "I shall
ask Charlie Orgreave first.  He’ll tell me the best man."

"You seem to have a great belief in Charlie," said Ingpen.

"I have," said Hilda, who had seen Charlie at George’s bedside when
nobody knew whether George would live or die.

And while they were talking about Charlie and about Janet, who was now
living with her brother at Ealing, the sounds of George stoking the
furnace below came dully up through the floor-boards.

"If you and George are going away," asked Ingpen, "what’ll happen to his
worship--with not a servant in the house?"

This important point had been occupying Edwin’s mind ever since Hilda
had first announced her intention to go to London.  But he had not
mentioned it to her, nor she to him, their relations being rather
delicate.  It had, for him, only an academic interest, since he had
determined that she should not go to London on the morrow.  Nevertheless
he awaited anxiously the reply.

Hilda answered with composure:

"I’m hoping he’ll come with us."

He had been prepared for anything but this.  The proposition was
monstrously impossible.  Could a man leave his works at a moment’s
notice?  The notion was utterly absurd.

"That’s quite out of the question," he said at once. He was absolutely
sincere.  The effect of Ingpen’s discourse was, however, such as to
upset the assured dignity of his pronouncement; for the decision was
simply an illustration of Ingpen’s theory concerning him. He blushed.

"Why is it out of the question?" demanded Hilda, inimically gazing at
him.

She had lost her lenient attitude towards him of the afternoon.
Nevertheless, reflecting upon Tertius Ingpen’s indictment of the usual
happy marriage, she had been planning the expedition to London as a
revival of romance in their lives.  She saw it as a marvellous
rejuvenating experience.  When she thought of all that she had suffered,
and all that Edwin had suffered, in order that they might come together,
she was quite desolated by the prosaic flatness of the ultimate result.
Was it to attain their present stolid existence that they had endured
affliction for a decade?  She wanted passionately to break the
mysterious bands that held them both back from ecstasy and romance.  And
he would not help her.  He would not enter into her desire.  She had
known that he would refuse.  He refused everything--he was so set in his
own way.  Resentment radiated from her.

"I can’t," said Edwin.  "What d’you want to go to-morrow for?  What does
a day or two matter?"

Then she loosed her tongue.  Why to-morrow? Because you couldn’t trifle
with a child’s eyesight. Already the thing had been dragging on for
goodness knew how long.  Every day might be of importance. And why not
to-morrow?  They could shut the house up, and go off together and stay
at Charlie’s.  Hadn’t Janet asked them many a time?  Maggie would look
out for new servants.  And Mrs. Tams would clean the house.  It was
really the best way out of the servant question too, besides being the
best for George.

"And there’s another thing," she went on without a pause, speaking
rapidly and clearly.  "Your eyes want seeing to as well.  Do you think I
don’t know?" she sneered.

"Mine!" he exclaimed.  "My eyes are as right as rain."  It was not true.
His eyes had been troubling him.

"Then why have you had a double candle-bracket fixed at your bed-head,
when a single one’s been enough for you all these years?" she demanded.

"I just thought of it, that’s all," said Edwin glumly, and with no
attempt to be diplomatic.  "Anyhow I can’t go to London to-morrow.  And
when I want an oculist," he finished with grimness, "Hanbridge’ll be
good enough for me, I’m thinking."

Strange, she had never before said a word to him about his eyes!

"Then what shall you do while I’m away?" she asked implacably.

But if she was implacable, he also could be implacable. If she insisted
on leaving him in the lurch,--well, she should leave him in the lurch!
Tertius Ingpen was witness of a plain breach between them.  It was
unfortunate; it was wholly Hilda’s fault; but he had to face the fact.

"I don’t know," he replied curtly.

The next moment George returned.

"Hasn’t Mrs. Tams been quick, mother?" said George.  "She’s come."

                                   VI

In the drawing-room, after the meal, Edwin could hear through the half
open door the sounds of conversation between Hilda and Mrs. Tams, with
an occasional word from George, who was going to help Mrs. Tams to "put
the things away" after she had washed and wiped.  The voice of Mrs. Tams
was very gentle and comforting.  Edwin’s indignant pity went out to her.
Why should Mrs. Tams thus cheerfully bear the misfortunes of others?
Why should she at a moment’s notice leave a cottageful of young children
and a husband liable at any time to get drunk and maim either them or
her, in order to meet a crisis caused by Hilda’s impulsiveness and lack
of tact?  The answer, as in so many cases, was of course economic.  Mrs.
Tams could not afford not to be at Mrs. Clayhanger’s instant call; also
she was born the victim of her own altruism; her soul was soft like her
plump cushionlike body, and she lived as naturally in injustice as a
fish in water. But could anything excuse those who took advantage of
such an economic system and such a devoted nature? Edwin’s conscience
uneasily stirred; he could have blushed.  However, he was helpless; and
he was basely glad that he was helpless, that it was no affair of his
after all, and that Mrs. Tams had thus to work out her destiny to his
own benefit.  He saw in her a seraph for the next world, and yet in this
world he contentedly felt himself her superior.  And her voice,
soothing, acquiescent, expressive of the spirit which gathers in
extraneous woes as the mediæval saint drew to his breast the swords of
the executioners, continued to murmur in the hall.

Edwin thought:

"I alone in this house feel the real significance of Mrs. Tams.  I’m
sure she doesn’t feel it herself."

But these reflections were only the vague unimportant background to the
great matter in his mind,--the difficulty with Hilda.  When he had
entered the house, questions of gaslight and blinds were enormous to
him.  The immense general question of servants had diminished them to a
trifle.  Then the question of George’s headache and eyesight had taken
precedence. And now the relations of husband and wife were mightily
paramount over everything else.  Tertius Ingpen, having as usual opened
the piano, was idly diverting himself with strange chords, while
cigarette smoke rose into his eyes, making him blink.  Like Edwin,
Ingpen was a little self-conscious after the open trouble in the
dining-room.  It would have been absurd to pretend that trouble did not
exist; on the other hand the trouble was not of the kind that could be
referred to, by even a very intimate friend.  The acknowledgment of it
had to be mute.  But in addition to being self-conscious, Ingpen was
also triumphant.  There was a peculiar sardonic and somewhat disdainful
look on his face as he mused over the chords, trying to keep the
cigarette smoke out of his eyes.  His oblique glance seemed to be saying
to Edwin: "What have I always told you about women?  Well, you’ve
married and you must take the consequences.  Your wife’s no worse than
other wives.  Here am I, free!  And wouldn’t you like to be in my place,
my boy! ... How wise I have been!"

Edwin resented these unspoken observations.  The contrast between
Ingpen’s specious support and flattery of Hilda when she was present,
and his sardonic glance when she was absent, was altogether too marked.
Himself in revolt against the institution of marriage, Edwin could not
bear that Ingpen should attack it. Edwin had, so far as concerned the
outside world, taken the institution of marriage under his protection.
Moreover Ingpen’s glance was a criticism of Hilda such as no husband
ought to permit.  And it was also a criticism of the husband--that slave
and dupe! ... Yet, at bottom what Edwin resented was Ingpen’s
contemptuous pity for the slave and the dupe.

"Why London--and why to-morrow?" said Edwin, cheerfully, with a superior
philosophical air, as though impartially studying an argumentative
position, as though he could regard the temporary vagaries of an
otherwise fine sensible woman with bland detachment. He said it because
he was obliged to say something, in order to prove that he was neither a
slave nor a dupe.

"Ask me another," replied Ingpen curtly, continuing to produce chords.

"Well, we shall see," said Edwin mysteriously, firmly, and loftily;
meaning that, if his opinion were invited, his opinion would be that
Hilda would not go away to-morrow and that whenever she went she would
not go to London.

He had decided to have a grand altercation with his wife that night,
when Ingpen and Mrs. Tams had departed and George was asleep and they
had the house to themselves.  He knew his ground and he could force a
decisive battle.  He felt no doubt as to the result. The news of his
triumph should reach Ingpen.

Ingpen was apparently about to take up the conversation when George came
clumsily and noisily into the drawing-room.  All his charm seemed to
have left him.

"I thought you were going to help," said Edwin.

"So I am," George challenged him; and, lacking the courage to stop at
that point, added: "But they aren’t ready yet."

"Let’s try those Haydn bits, George," Ingpen suggested.

"Oh no!" said George curtly.

Ingpen and the boy had begun to play easy fragments of duets together.

Edwin said with sternness:

"Sit down to that piano and do as Mr. Ingpen asks you."

George flushed and looked foolish and sat down; and Ingpen quizzed him.
All three knew well that Edwin’s fierceness was only one among sundry
consequences of the mood of the housemistress.  The slow movement and
the scherzo from the symphony were played.  And while the music went on,
Edwin heard distantly the opening and shutting of the front-door and an
arrival in the hall, and then chattering.  Maggie had called.  "What’s
she after?" thought Edwin.

"Hoo!  There’s Auntie Maggie!" George exclaimed, as soon as the scherzo
was finished, and ran off.

"That boy is really musical," said Ingpen with conviction.

"Yes, I suppose he is," Edwin agreed casually, as though deprecating a
talent which however was undeniable.  "But you’d never guess he’s got a
bad headache, would you?"

It was a strange kind of social evening, and Hilda--it seemed to the
august Edwin--had a strange notion of the duties of hostess.  Surely, if
Mrs. Tams was in the kitchen, Hilda ought to be in the drawing-room with
their guest!  Surely Maggie ought to have been brought into the
drawing-room,--she was not a school girl, she was a woman of over forty,
and yet she had quite inexcusably kept her ancient awkwardness and
timidities.  He could hear chatterings from the dining-room, scurryings
through the hall, and chatterings from the kitchen; then a smash of
crockery, a slight scream, and girlish gigglings.  They were all the
same, all the women he knew, except perhaps Clara,--they had hours when
they seemed to forget that they were adult and that their skirts were
long.  And how was it that Hilda and Maggie were suddenly so intimate,
they whose discreet mutual jealousy was an undeniable phenomenon of the
family life?  With all his majesty he was simpleton enough never to have
understood that two women who eternally suspect each other may yet
dissolve upon occasion into the most touching playful tenderness.  The
whole ground-floor was full of the rumour of an apparent alliance
between Hilda and Maggie.  And as he listened Edwin glanced sternly at
the columns of the evening _Signal_, while Tertius Ingpen, absorbed,
worked his way bravely through a sonata of Beethoven.

Then George reappeared.

"Mother’s going to take me to London to-morrow about my eyes," said
George to Ingpen, stopping the sonata by his mere sense of the terrific
importance of such tidings.  And he proceeded to describe the projected
doings in London, the visit to Charlie and Janet Orgreave, and possibly
to the Egyptian Hall.

Edwin did not move.  He kept an admirable and complete calm under the
blow.  Hilda was decided, then, to defy him.  In telling the boy, who
during the meal had been permitted to learn nothing, she had burnt her
boats; she had even burnt Edwin’s boats also: which seemed to be
contrary to the rules laid down by society for conjugal warfare,--but
women never could fight according to rules!  The difficulties and
dangers of the great pitched battle which Edwin had planned for the
close of the evening were swiftly multiplied.  He had misgivings.

The chattering, giggling girls entered the drawing-room.  But as Maggie
came through the doorway her face stiffened; her eyes took on a glaze;
and when Ingpen bent over her hand in all the false ardour of his
excessive conventional chivalry, the spinster’s terrible
constraint--scourge of all her social existence--gripped her like a
disease.  She could scarcely speak.

"Hello, Mag," Edwin greeted her.

Impossible to divine in this plump, dowdy, fading, dumb creature the
participator in all those chatterings and gigglings of a few moments
earlier!  Nevertheless Edwin, who knew her profoundly, could see beneath
the glaze of those eyes the commonsense soul of the sagacious woman
protesting against Ingpen’s affected manners and deciding that she did
not care for Ingpen at all.

"Auntie Hamps is being naughty again," said Hilda bluntly.

Ingpen, and then Edwin, sniggered.

"_I_ can’t do anything with her, Edwin," said Maggie, speaking quickly
and eagerly, as she and Hilda sat down.  "She’s bound to let herself in
for another attack if she doesn’t take care of herself.  And she won’t
take care of herself.  She won’t listen to the doctor or anybody else.
She’s always on her feet, and she’s got sewing-meetings on the brain
just now.  I’ve got her to bed early to-night--she’s frightfully
shaky--and I thought I’d come up and tell you.  You’re the only one that
can do anything with her at all, and you really must come and see her
to-morrow on your way to the works."

Maggie spoke as though she had been urging Edwin for months to take the
urgent matter in hand and was now arrived at desperation.

"All right!  All right!" said he, with amiable impatience; it was the
first he had heard of the matter. "I’ll drop in.  But I’ve got no
influence over her," he added, with sincerity.

"Oh yes, you have!" said Maggie, mildly now.  "I’m very sorry to hear
about George’s eyes.  Seeing it’s absolutely necessary for Hilda to take
him to London to-morrow, and you’ve got no servants at all, can’t you
come and sleep at Auntie’s for a night or two?  You’ve no idea what a
relief it would be to me."

In an instant Edwin saw that he was beaten, that Hilda and Maggie, in
the intervals of their giggling, had combined to overthrow him.  The
tone in which Maggie uttered the words ’George’s eyes,’ ’absolutely
necessary’ and ’such a relief’ precluded argument. His wife would have
her capricious unnecessary way, and he would be turned out of his own
house.

"I think you might, dear," said Hilda, with the angelic persuasiveness
of a loving and submissive wife. Nobody could have guessed from that
marvellous tone that she had been determined to defeat him and was then,
so to speak, standing over his prostrate form.

Maggie, having said what was necessary to be said, fell back into the
constraint from which no efforts of her companions could extricate her.
Such was the effect upon her of the presence of Tertius Ingpen, a
stranger.  Presently Ingpen was scanning time-tables for Hilda, and
George was finding notepaper for her, and Maggie was running up and down
stairs for her. She was off to London.  "In that woman’s head," thought
Edwin, as, observing his wife, he tried in vain to penetrate the secrets
behind her demeanour, "there’s only room for one idea at a time."

                                  VII

Edwin sat alone in the drawing-room, at the end of an evening which he
declined to call an evening at all.  His eyes regarded a book on his
knee, but he was not reading it.  His mind was engaged upon the enigma
of his existence.  He had entered his house without the least
apprehension, and brusquely, in a few hours, everything seemed to be
changed for him.  Impulse had conquered commonsense; his ejectment was a
settled thing; and he was condemned to the hated abode of Auntie Hamps.
Events seemed enormous; they desolated him; his mouth was full of ashes.
The responsibilities connected with George were increasing; his wife,
incalculable and unforeseeable, was getting out of hand; and the menace
of a future removal to another home in the country was raised again.

He looked about the room; and he imagined all the house, every object in
which was familiar and beloved, and he simply could not bear to think of
the disintegration of these interiors by furniture-removers, and of the
endless rasping business of creating a new home in partnership with a
woman whose ideas about furnishing were as unsound as they were
capricious.  He utterly dismissed the fanciful scheme, as he dismissed
the urgings towards public activity.  He deeply resented all these
headstrong intentions to disturb him in his tranquillity.  They were
indefensible, and he would not have them.  He would die in sullen
obstinacy rather than yield.  Impulse might conquer commonsense, but not
beyond a certain degree.  He would never yield.

Ingpen had departed, to sleep in a room in the same building as his
office at Hanbridge.  He knew that Ingpen had no comprehension of
domestic comfort and a well-disposed day.  Nevertheless he envied the
man his celestial freedom.  If he, Edwin, were free, what an ideal life
he could make for himself, a life presided over by commonsense,
regularity, and order!  He was not free; he would never be free; and
what had he obtained in exchange for freedom? ... Ingpen’s immense
criticism smote him.  He had a wife and her child; servants--at
intervals; a fine works and many workpeople; a house, with books; money,
security.  The organised machinery of his existence was tremendous; and
it was all due to him, made by him in his own interests and to satisfy
his own desires.  Without him the entire structure would crumble in a
week; without him it would have no excuse.  And what was the result? Was
he ever, in any ideal sense, happy: that is, free from foreboding, from
friction, from responsibility, and withal lightly joyous?  Was any
quarter of an hour of his day absolutely what he would have wished? He
ranged over his day, and concluded that the best part of it was the very
last....  He got into bed, the candles in the sconce were lit, the gas
diminished to a blue speck, and most of the room in darkness; he lay
down on his left side, took the marker from the volume in his hand, and
began to read; the house was silent and enclosed; the rumbling
tramcar--to whose sound he had been accustomed from infancy--did not a
bit disturb him; it was in another world; over the edge of his book he
could see the form of his wife, fast asleep in the other bed, her
plaited hair trailing over the pillow; the feel of the sheets to his
limbs was exquisite; he read, the book was good; the chill of winter
just pleasantly affected the hand that held the book; nothing annoyed;
nothing jarred; sleep approached....  That fifteen minutes, that twenty
or thirty minutes, was all that he could show as the result of the
tremendous organised machinery of his existence--his house, his works,
his workpeople, his servants, his wife with her child....

Hilda came with quick determination into the drawing-room.  They had not
spoken to each other alone since the decision and his defeat.  He was
aware of his heart beating resentfully.

"I’m going to bed now, dear," she said in an ordinary tone.  "I’ve got a
frightful headache, and I must sleep.  Be sure and wake me up at seven
in the morning, will you?  I shall have such lots to do."

He thought:

"Has she a frightful headache?"

She bent down and kissed him several times, very fervently; her lips
lingered on his.  And all the time she frowned ever so little; and it
was as if she was conveying to him: "But--each for himself in marriage,
after all."

In spite of himself, he felt just a little relieved; and he could not
understand why.  He watched her as she left the room.  How had it come
about that the still finally mysterious creature was living in his
house, imposing her individuality upon him, spoiling his existence?  He
considered that it was all disconcertingly strange.

He rose, lit a cigarette, and opened the window; and the frosty air,
entering, braced him and summoned his self-reliance.  The night was
wondrous.  And when he had shut the window and turned again within, the
room, beautiful, withdrawn, peaceful, was wondrous too.  He reflected
that soon he would be in bed, calmly reading, with his wife unconscious
as an infant in the other bed. And then his grievance against Hilda
slowly surged up and he began for the first time to realise how vast it
was.

"Confound that woman!" he muttered, meaning Auntie Hamps.

                             CHAPTER XVIII

                         AUNTIE HAMPS SENTENCED

On the next evening it was Maggie who opened Mrs. Hamps’s front-door for
Edwin.  There was no light in the lobby, but a faint gleam coming
through the open door of the sitting-room disclosed the silhouette of
Maggie’s broad figure.

"I thought you’d call in this morning," said Maggie discontentedly.  "I
asked you to.  I’ve been expecting you all day."

"Didn’t you get my message?"

"No.  What message?"

"D’you mean to say a lad hasn’t been here with my portmanteau?" demanded
Edwin, alarmed and ready to be annoyed.

"Yes.  A lad’s been with your portmanteau.  But he gave no message."

"D--n him.  I told him to tell you I couldn’t possibly get here before
night."

"Well, he didn’t!" said Maggie stoutly, throwing back the blame upon
Edwin and his hirelings.  "I particularly wanted you to come early.  I
told Auntie you’d be coming."

"How’s she getting on?" Edwin asked with laconic gruffness, dismissing
Maggie’s grievance without an apology.  He might have to stand nonsense
from Hilda; but he would not stand it from Maggie, of whose notorious
mildness he at once began to take advantage, as in the old days of their
housekeeping together.  Moreover, his entrance into this abode was a
favour, exhibiting the condescension of the only human being who could
exercise influence upon Auntie Hamps.

"She’s worse," said Maggie, briefly and significantly.

"In bed?" said Edwin, less casually, marking her tone.

Maggie nodded.

"Had the doctor?"

"I should think so indeed!"

"Hm!  Why don’t you have a light in this lobby?" he enquired suddenly,
on a drily humorous note, as he groped to suspend his overcoat upon an
unstable hatstand.  It seemed to be a very cold lobby, after his own
radiator-heated half.

"She never will have a light here, unless she’s doing the grand for
someone.  Are you going to wash ye?"

"No.  I cleaned up at the works."  A presentiment of the damp chilliness
of the Hamps bedroom had suggested this precaution.

Maggie preceded him into the sitting-room, where a hexagonal
occasional-table was laid for tea.

"Hello!  Do you eat here?  What’s the matter with the dining-room?"

"The chimney always smokes when the wind’s in the south-west."

"Well, why doesn’t she have a cowl put on it?"

"You’d better ask her....  Also she likes to save a fire.  She can’t
bear to have two fires going as well as the kitchen-range.  I’ll bring
tea in.  It’s all ready."

Maggie went away.

Edwin looked round the shabby Victorian room.  A length of featureless
linoleum led from the door to the table.  This carpet-protecting
linoleum exasperated him.  It expressed the very spirit of his aunt’s
house. He glanced at the pictures, the texts, the beady and the woolly
embroideries, the harsh chairs, and the magnificent morocco exteriors of
the photograph-albums in which Auntie Hamps kept the shiny portraits of
all her relatives, from grand-nieces back to the third and fourth
generation of ancestors.  And a feeling of desolation came over him.  He
thought: "How many days shall I have to spend in this deadly hole?"  It
was extremely seldom that he visited King Street, and when he did come
the house was brightened to receive him. He had almost forgotten what
the house really was. And, suddenly thrown back into it at its most
lugubrious and ignoble, after years of the amenities of Trafalgar Road,
he was somehow surprised that that sort of thing had continued to exist,
and he resented that it should have dared to continue to exist.  He had
a notion that, since he had left it behind, it ought to have perished.

He cautiously lifted the table and carried it to the hearthrug.  Then he
sat down in the easy-chair, whose special property, as he remembered,
was slowly and inevitably to slide the sitter forward to the hard edge
of the seat; and he put his feet inside the fender. In the grate a small
fire burned between two fire-bricks.  He sneezed.  Maggie came in with a
tray.

"Are you cold?" she asked, seeing the new situation of the table.

"Am I cold!" Edwin repeated.

"Well," said Maggie, "I always think your rooms are so hot."

Edwin seized the small serviceable tongs which saved the wear of the
large tongs matching the poker and the shovel, and he dragged both
firebricks out of the grate.

"No coal here, I suppose!" he exclaimed gloomily, opening the black
japanned coal-scuttle.  "Oh!  Corn in Egypt!"  The scuttle was full of
coal.  He threw on to the fire several profuse shovelfuls of best
household nuts which had cost sixteen shillings a ton even in that
district of cheap coal.

"Well," Maggie murmured, aghast.  "It’s a good thing it’s you.  If it
had been anybody else--"

"What on earth does she do with her money?" he muttered.

Shrugging her shoulders, Maggie went out again with an empty tray.

"No servant, either?" Edwin asked, when she returned.

"She’s sitting with Auntie."

"Must I go up before I have my tea?"

"No.  She won’t have heard you come."

There was a grilled mutton-chop and a boiled egg on the crowded small
table, with tea, bread-and-butter, two rounds of dry bread, some cakes,
and jam.

"Which are you having--egg or chop?" Edwin demanded as Maggie sat down.

"Oh!  They’re both for you."

"And what about you?"

"I only have bread-and-butter as a rule."

Edwin grunted, and started to eat.

"What’s supposed to be the matter with her?" he enquired.

"It seems it’s congestion of the lung, and thickened arteries.  It
wouldn’t matter so much about the lung being congested, in itself, only
it’s the strain on her heart."

"I see."

"Been in bed all day, I suppose."

"No, she would get up.  But she had to go back to bed at once.  She had
a collapse."

"Hm!"

He could not think of anything else to say.

"Haven’t got to-night’s _Signal_, have you?"

"Oh no!" said Maggie, astonished at such a strange demand.  "Hilda get
off all right?"

"Yes, they went by the nine train."

"She told me that she should, if she could manage it.  I expect Mrs.
Tams was up there early."

Edwin nodded, recalling with bitterness certain moments of the early
morning.  And then silence ensued. The brother and sister could not keep
the conversation alive.  Edwin thought: "We know each other intimately,
and we respect each other, and yet we cannot even conduct a meal
together without awkwardness and constraint.  Has civilisation down here