"No, I'm not," she replied. Her spirit lifted a little courageously, to meet his with defiance, like a ship lifting its prow above the threatening billow. Her eyes wavered, but did not fall before his.

"Really! Now, I should have said you were a great reader. What do you do with yourself?" He now spoke like a brother, confident of a trustful response.

"I just waste my time," she answered coldly. She saw that he was puzzled, interested, and piqued, and that he was examining her quite afresh.

"Well," he said shortly, after a pause, adopting the benevolent tone of an uncle or even a great-uncle, "you'll be getting married one of these days."

"I don't want to get married," she retorted obstinately, and with a harder glance.

"Then what do you want?"

"I don't know." She discovered great relief, even pleasure, in thus callously exposing her mind to a stranger.

Tapping his teeth with one thumb, he gazed at her, apparently in meditation upon her peculiar case. At last he said:

"I tell you what you ought to do. You ought to go in for phonography."

"Phonography?" She was at a loss.

"Yes; Pitman's shorthand, you know."

"Oh! shorthand--yes. I've heard of it. But why?"

"Why? It's going to be the great thing of the future. There never was anything like it!" His voice grew warm and his glance scintillated. And now Hilda understood her mother's account of his persuasiveness; she felt the truth of that odd remark that he could talk the hind leg off a horse.

"But does it lead to anything?" she inquired, with her strong sense of intrinsic values.

"I should say it did!" he answered. "It leads to everything! There's nothing it won't lead to! It's the key of the future. You'll see. Look at Dayson. He's taken it up, and now he's giving lessons in it. He's got a room over his aunt's. I can tell you he staggered me. He wrote in shorthand as fast as ever I could read to him, and then he read out what he'd written, without a single slip. I'm having one of my chaps taught.

I'm paying for the lessons. I thought of learning myself--yes, really!

Oh! It's a thing that'll revolutionize all business and secretarial work and so on--revolutionize it! And it's spreading. It'll be the Open Sesame to everything. Anybody that can write a hundred and twenty words a minute'll be able to walk into any situation he wants--straight _into_ it! There's never been anything like it. Look! Here it is!"

He s.n.a.t.c.hed up a pale-green booklet from the desk and opened it before her. She saw the cryptic characters for the first time. And she saw them with his glowing eyes. In their mysterious strokes and curves and dots she saw romance, and the key of the future; she saw the philosopher's stone. She saw a new religion that had already begun to work like leaven in the town. The revelation was deliciously intoxicating. She was converted, as by lightning. She yielded to the ecstasy of discipleship.

Here--somehow, inexplicably, incomprehensively--here was the answer to the enigma of her long desire. And it was an answer original, strange, distinguished, unexpected, unique; yes, and divine! How lovely, how beatific, to be the master of this enchanted key!

"It must be very interesting!" she said, low, with the venturesome shyness of a deer that is rea.s.sured.

"I don't mind telling you this," Mr. Cannon went on, with the fire of the prophet. "I've got something coming along pretty soon"--he repeated more slowly--"I've got something coming along pretty soon, where there'll be scope for a young lady that can write shorthand _well_. I can't tell you what it is, but it's something different from anything there's ever been in this town; _and_ better."

His eyes masterfully held hers, seeming to say: "I'm vague. But I was vague when I told you I'd see what could be done about your mother--and look at what I did, and how quickly and easily I did it! When I'm vague, it means a lot." And she entirely understood that his vagueness was calculated--out of pride.

They talked about Mr. Dayson a little.

"I must go now," said Hilda awkwardly.

"I'd like you to take that Hugo," he said. "I dare say it would interest you.... Remind you of old times."

"Oh no!"

"You can return it, when you like."

Her features became apologetic. She had too hastily a.s.sumed that he wished to force a gift on her.

"Please!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. No abuse this time of moral authority! But an appeal, boyish, wistful, supplicating. It was irresistible, completely irresistible. It gave her an extraordinary sense of personal power.

He wrapped up the book for her in a sheet of blue "draft" paper that noisily crackled. While he was doing so, a tiny part of her brain was, as it were, automatically exploring a box of old books in the attic at home and searching therein for a Gasc's French-English Dictionary which she had used at school and never thought of since.

"My compliments to your mother," he said at parting.

She gazed at him questioningly.

"Oh! I was forgetting," he corrected himself, with an avuncular, ironic smile. "You're not supposed to have seen me, are you?"

Then she was outside in the din; and from thrilling alt.i.tudes she had to bring her mind to marketing. She hid under apples the flat blue parcel in the basket.

CHAPTER VII THE EDITORIAL SECRETARY

I

Arthur Dayson, though a very good shorthand writer, and not without experience as a newspaper reporter and sub-editor, was a nincomp.o.o.p.

There could be no other explanation of his bland, complacent indifference as he sat poking at a c.o.ke stove one cold night of January, 1880, in full view of a most marvellous and ravishing spectacle. The stove was in a room on the floor above the offices labelled as Mr. Q.

Karkeek's; its pipe, supported by wire stays, went straight up nearly to the grimy ceiling, and then turned horizontally and disappeared through a clumsy hole in the scorched wall. It was a shabby stove, but not more so than the other few articles of furniture--a large table, a small desk, three deteriorated cane-chairs, two gas brackets, and an old copying-press on its rickety stand. The sole object that could emerge brightly from the ordeal of the gas-flare was a splendid freshly printed blue poster gummed with stamp-paper to the wall: which poster bore the words, in vast capitals of two sizes: "_The Five Towns Chronicle and Turnhill Guardian_." Copies of this poster had also been fixed, face outwards, on the two curtainless black windows, to announce to the Market Square what was afoot in the top storey over the ironmonger's.

A young woman, very soberly attired, was straining at the double iron-handles of the copying-press. Some copying-presses have a screw so accurately turned and so well oiled, and handles so ma.s.sively like a fly-wheel, that a touch will send the handles whizzing round and round till they stop suddenly, and then one slight wrench more, and the letters are duly copied! But this was not such a press. It had been outworn in Mr. Karkeek's office; rust had intensified its original defects of design, and it produced the minimum of result with the maximum of means. Nevertheless, the young woman loved it. She clenched her hands and her teeth, and she frowned, as though she loved it. And when she had sufficiently crushed the letter-book in the press, she lovingly unscrewed and drew forth the book; and with solicitude she opened the book on the smaller table, and tenderly detached the blotting-paper from the damp tissue paper, and at last extracted the copied letter and examined its surface.

"Smudged!" she murmured, tragic.

And the excellent a.s.s Dayson, always facetiously cheerful, and without a grain of humour, remarked:

"Copiousness with the H2O, Miss Lessways, is the father of smudged epistles. I'm ready to go through these proofs with you as soon as you are."

He was over thirty. He had had affairs with young women. He reckoned that there remained little for him to learn. He had deliberately watched this young woman at the press. He had clearly seen her staring under the gas-jet at the copied letter. And yet in her fierce muscular movements, and in her bendings and straightenings, and in her delicate caressings, and in her savage scowlings and wrinklings, and in her rapt gazings, and in all her awful absorption, he had quite failed to perceive the terrible eager outpouring of a human soul, mighty, pa.s.sionate, and wistful. He had kept his eyes on her slim bust and tight-girded waist that sprung suddenly neat and smooth out of the curving skirt-folds, and it had not occurred to him to exclaim even in his own heart: "With your girlishness and your ferocity, your intimidating seriousness and your delicious absurdity, I would give a week's wages just to take hold of you and shake you!" No! The dolt had seen absolutely naught but a conscientious female beginner learning the duties of the post which he himself had baptized as that of 'editorial secretary.'

II

Hilda was no longer in a nameless trouble. She no longer wanted she knew not what. She knew beyond all questioning that she had found that which she had wanted. For nearly a year she had had lessons in phonography from Miss Dayson's nephew, often as a member of a varying night-cla.s.s, and sometimes alone during the day. She could not write shorthand as well as Mr. Dayson, and she never would, for Mr. Dayson had the shorthand soul; but, as the result of sustained and terrific effort, she could write it pretty well. She had grappled with Isaac Pitman as with Apollyon and had not been worsted. She could scarcely believe that in cla.s.s she had taken down at the rate of ninety words a minute Mr.

Dayson's purposely difficult political speechifyings (which always contained the phrase 'capital punishment,' because 'capital punishment'

was a famous grammalogue); but it was so, Mr. Dayson's watch proved it.

About half-way through the period of study, she had learnt from Mr.

Cannon, on one of his rare visits to her mother's, something about his long-matured scheme for a new local paper. She had at once divined that he meant to offer her some kind of a situation in the enterprise, and she was right. Grat.i.tude filled her. Mrs. Lessways, being one of your happy-go-lucky, broad-minded women, with an experimental disposition--a disposition to let things alone and see how they will turn out--had made little objection, though she was not encouraging.

Instantly the newspaper had become the chief article of Hilda's faith.

She accepted the idea of it as a nun accepts the sacred wafer, in ecstasy. Yet she knew little about it. She was aware that Mr. Cannon meant to establish it first as a weekly, and then, when it had grown, to transform it into a daily and wage war with that powerful monopolist, _The Staffordshire Signal_, which from its offices at Hanbridge covered the entire district. The original t.i.tle had been _The Turnhill Guardian and Five Towns General Chronicle,_ and she had approved it; but when Mr.

Cannon, with a view to the intended development, had inverted the t.i.tle to _The Five Towns Chronicle and Turnhill Guardian_, she had enthusiastically applauded his deep wisdom. Also she had applauded his project of moving, later on, to Hanbridge, the natural centre of the Five Towns. This was nearly the limit of her knowledge. She neither knew nor cared anything about the resources or the politics or the programme or the prospects of the paper. To her all newspapers were much alike.