CHAPTER VII

THE CINEMA

I

That evening Rachel sat alone in the parlour, reclining on the Chesterfield over the _Signal_. She had picked up the _Signal_ in order to read about captured burglars, but the paper contained not one word on the subject, or on any other subject except football. The football season had commenced in splendour, and it happened to be the football edition of the _Signal_ that the paper-boy had foisted upon Mrs. Maldon's house. Despite repeated and positive a.s.surances from Mrs. Maldon that she wanted the late edition and not the football edition on Sat.u.r.day nights, the football edition was usually delivered, because the paper-boy could not conceive that any customer could sincerely not want the football edition. Rachel was glancing in a torpid condition at the advertis.e.m.e.nts of the millinery and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g shops.

She would have been more wakeful could she have divined the blow which she had escaped a couple of hours before. Between five and six o'clock, when she was upstairs in the large bedroom, Mrs. Maldon had said to her, "Rachel--" and stopped. "Yes, Mrs. Maldon," she had replied. And Mrs. Maldon had said, "Nothing." Mrs. Maldon had desired to say, but in words carefully chosen: "Rachel, I've never told you that Louis Fores began life as a bank clerk, and was dismissed for stealing money. And even since then his conduct has not been blameless." Mrs. Maldon had stopped because she could not find the form of words which would permit her to impart to her paid companion this information about her grand-nephew. Mrs. Maldon, when the moment for utterance came, had discovered that she simply could not do it, and all her conscientious regard for Rachel and all her sense of duty were not enough to make her do it. So that Rachel, unsuspectingly, had been spared a tremendous emotional crisis. By this time she had grown nearly accustomed to the fact of the disappearance of the money. She had completely recovered from the hysteria caused by old Batchgrew's attack, and was, indeed, in the supervening calm, very much ashamed of it.

She meant to doze, having firmly declined the suggestion of Mrs. Tams that she should go to bed at seven o'clock, and she was just dropping the paper when a tap on the window startled her. She looked in alarm at the window, where the position of one of the blinds proved the correctness of Mrs. Maldon's secret theory that if Mrs. Maldon did not keep a personal watch on the blinds they would never be drawn properly. Eight inches of black pane showed, and behind that dark transparency something vague and pale. She knew it must be the hand of Louis Fores that had tapped, and she could feel her heart beating.

She flew on tiptoe to the front door, and cautiously opened it. At the same moment Louis sprang from the narrow s.p.a.ce between the street railings and the bow window on to the steps. He raised his hat with the utmost grace.

"I saw your head over the arm of the Chesterfield," he said in a cheerful, natural low voice. "So I tapped on the gla.s.s. I thought if I knocked at the door I might waken the old lady. How are things to-night?"

In those few words he perfectly explained his manner of announcing himself, endowing it with the highest propriety. Rachel's misgivings were soothed in an instant. Her chief emotion was an ecstatic pride--because he had come, because he could not keep away, because she had known that he would come, that he must come. And in fact was it not his duty to come? Quietly he came into the hall, quietly she closed the door, and when they were shut up together in the parlour they both spoke in hushed voices, lest the invalid should be disturbed. And was not this, too, highly proper?

She gave him the news of the house and said that Mrs. Tams was taking duty in the sick-room till four o'clock in the morning, and herself thenceforward, but that the invalid gave no apparent cause for apprehension.

"Old Batch been again?" asked Louis, with a complete absence of any constraint.

She shook her head.

"You'll find that money yet--somewhere, when you're least expecting it," said he, almost gaily.

"I'm sure we shall," she agreed with conviction.

"And how are _you_?" His tone became anxious and particular.

She blushed deeply, for the outbreak of which she had been guilty and which he had witnessed, then smiled diffidently.

"Oh, I'm all right."

"You look as if you wanted some fresh air--if you'll excuse me saying so."

"I haven't been out to-day, of course," she said.

"Don't you think a walk--just a breath--would do you good!"

Without allowing herself to reflect, she answered--

"Well, I ought to have gone out long ago to get some food for to-morrow, as it's Sunday. Everything's been so neglected to-day. If the doctor happened to order a cutlet or anything for Mrs. Maldon, I don't know what I should do. Truly I ought to have thought of it earlier."

She seemed to be blaming herself for neglectfulness, and thus the enterprise of going out had the look of an act of duty. Her sensations bewildered her.

"Perhaps I could walk down with you and carry parcels. It's a good thing it's Sat.u.r.day night, or the shops might have been closed."

She made no answer to this, but stood up, breathing quickly.

"I'll just speak to Mrs. Tams."

Creeping upstairs, she silently pushed open the door of Mrs. Maldon's bedroom. The invalid was asleep. Mrs. Tams, her hands crossed in her comfortable lap, and her mouth widely open, was also asleep. But Mrs.

Tams was used to waking with the ease of a dog. Rachel beckoned her to the door. Without a sound the fat woman crossed the room.

"I'm just going out to buy a few things we want," said Rachel in her ear, adding no word as to Louis Fores.

Mrs. Tams nodded.

Rachel went to her bedroom, turned up the gas, straightened her hair, and put on her black hat, and her blue jacket trimmed with a nameless fur, and picked up some gloves and her purse. Before descending she gazed at herself for many seconds in the small, slanting gla.s.s. Coming downstairs, she took the marketing reticule from its hook in the kitchen pa.s.sage. Then she went back to the parlour and stood in the doorway, speechless, putting on her gloves rapidly.

"Ready?"

She nodded.

"Shall I?" Louis questioned, indicating the gas.

She nodded again, and, stretching to his full height, he managed to turn the gas down without employing a footstool as Rachel was compelled to do.

"Wait a moment," she whispered in the hall, when he had opened the front door. These were the first words she had been able to utter. She went to the kitchen for a latch-key. Inserting this latch-key in the keyhole on the outside, and letting Louis pa.s.s in front of her, she closed the front door with very careful precautions against noise, and withdrew the key.

"I'll take charge of that if you like," said Louis, noticing that she was hesitating where to bestow it.

She gave it up to him with a violent thrill. She was intensely happy and intensely fearful. She was only going out to do some shopping; but the door was shut behind her, and at her side was this magic, mysterious being, and the nocturnal universe lay around. Only twenty-four hours earlier she had shut the door behind her and gone forth to find Louis. And now, having found him, he and she were going forth together like close friends. So much had happened in twenty-four hours that the previous night seemed to be months away.

II

Instead of turning down Friendly Street, they kept straight along the lane till, becoming suddenly urban, it led them across tram-lines and Turnhill Road, and so through a gulf or inlet of the market-place behind the Shambles, the Police Office, and the Town Hall, into the market-place itself, which in these latter years was recovering a little of the commercial prestige s.n.a.t.c.hed from it half a century earlier by St. Luke's Square. Rats now marauded in the empty shops of St. Luke's Square, while the market-place glittered with custom, and the electric decoy of its facades lit up strangely the lower walls of the black and monstrous Town Hall.

Innumerable organized activities were going forward at that moment in the serried buildings of the endless confused streets that stretched up hill and down dale from one end of the Five Towns to the other--theatres, Empire music-halls, Hippodrome music-halls, picture-palaces in dozens, concerts, singsongs, spiritualistic propaganda, democratic propaganda, skating-rinks, Wild West exhibitions, Dutch auctions, and the private seances in dubious quarters of "psychologists," "clair-voyants," "scientific palmists,"

and other rascals who sold a foreknowledge of the future for eighteenpence or even a shilling. Viewed under certain aspects, it seemed indeed that the Five Towns, in the week-end desertion of its sordid factories, was reaching out after the higher life, the subtler life, the more elegant life of greater communities; but the little crowds and the little shops of Bursley market-place were nevertheless a proof that a tolerable number of people were still mainly interested in the primitive elemental enterprise of keeping stomachs filled and skins warm, and had no thought beyond it. In Bursley market-place the week's labour was being translated into food and drink and clothing by experts who could distinguish infallibly between elevenpence-halfpenny and a shilling. Rachel was such an expert. She forced her thoughts down to the familiar, sane, safe subject of shopping, though to-night her errands were of the simplest description, requiring no brains. But she could not hold her thoughts. A voice was continually whispering to her--not Louis Fores' voice, but a voice within herself, that she had never clearly heard before. Alternatively she scorned it and trembled at it.

She stopped in front of the huge window of Wason's Provision Emporium.

"Is this the first house of call?" asked Louis airily, swinging the reticule and his stick together.

"Well--" she hesitated. "Mrs. Tams told me they were selling Singapore pineapple at sevenpence-halfpenny. Mas. Maldon fancies pineapple. I've known her fancy a bit of pineapple when she wouldn't touch anything else.... Yes, there it is!"

In fact, the whole of the upper half of Wason's window was yellow with tins of preserved pineapple. And great tickets said: "Delicious chunks, 7 1/2d. per large tin. Chunks, 6 1/2d. per large tin."

Customers in ones and twos kept entering and leaving the shop. Rachel moved on towards the door, which was at the corner of the c.o.c.k yard, and looked within. The long double counters were being a.s.sailed by a surging mult.i.tude who fought for the attention of prestidigitatory salesmen.

"Hm!" murmured Rachel. "That may be all very well for Mrs. Tams...."

A moment later she said--