I

Hilda showed her smiling, flattering face at the door of Edwin's private office at a few minutes to one on Sat.u.r.day morning, and she said:

"I had to go to the dressmaker's after my shopping, so I thought I might as well call for you." She added with deference: "But I can wait if you're busy."

True that the question of mourning had taken her to the dressmaker's, and that the dressmaker lived in Shawport Lane, not four minutes from the works; but such accidents had nothing to do with her call, which, being part of a scheme of Hilda's, would have occurred in any case.

"I'm ready," said Edwin, pleased by the vision of his wife in the stylish wide-sleeved black jacket and black hat which she had bought in London. "What have you got in that parcel?"

"It's your new office-coat," Hilda replied, depositing on the desk the parcel which had been partly concealed behind her m.u.f.f. "I've mended the sleeves."

"Aha!" Edwin lightly murmured. "Let's have a look at it."

His benevolent att.i.tude towards the new office-coat surprised and charmed her. Before her journey to London with George he would have jealously resented any interfering hand among his apparel, but since her return he had been exquisitely amenable. She thought, proud of herself:

"It's really quite easy to manage him. I never used to go quite the right way about it."

Her new system, which was one of the results of contact with London and which had been inaugurated a week earlier on the platform of Knype station when she stepped down from the London train, consisted chiefly in smiles, voice-control, and other devices to make Edwin believe in any discussion that she fully appreciated his point of view. Often (she was startled to find) this simulation had the unexpected result of causing her actually to appreciate his point of view. Which was very curious.

London indeed had had its effect on Hilda. She had seen the Five Towns from a distance, and as something definitely provincial. Having lived for years at Brighton, which is almost a suburb of London, and also for a short time in London itself, she could not think of herself as a provincial, in the full sense in which Edwin, for example, was a provincial. She had gone to London with her son, not like a staring and intimidated provincial, but with the confidence of an initiate returning to the scene of initiation. And once she was there, all her old condescensions towards the dirty and primitive ingenuous Five Towns had very quickly revived. She discovered Charlie Orgreave, the fairly successful doctor in Ealing (a suburb rich in doctors), to be the perfect Londoner, and Janet, no longer useless and forlorn, scarcely less so. These two, indeed, had the air of having at length reached their proper home after being born in exile. The same was true of Johnnie Orgreave, now safely through the matrimonial court and married to his blonde Adela (formerly the ripping Mrs. Chris Hamson), whose money had bought him a junior partnership in an important architectural firm in Russell Square. Johnnie and Adela had come over from Bedford Park to Ealing to see Hilda, and Hilda had dined with them at Bedford Park at a table illuminated by crimson-shaded night-lights,--a repast utterly different in its appointments and atmosphere from anything conceivable in Trafalgar Road. The current Five Towns notion of Johnnie and his wife as two morally ruined creatures hiding for the rest of their lives in shame from an outraged public opinion, seemed merely comic in Ealing and Bedford Park. These people referred to the Five Towns with negligent affection, but with disdain, as to a community that, with all its good qualities, had not yet emerged from barbarism.

They a.s.sumed that their att.i.tude was also Hilda's, and Hilda, after a moment's secret resentment, had indeed made their att.i.tude her own.

When she mentioned that she hoped soon to move Edwin into a country house, they applauded and implied that no other course was possible.

Withal, their respect, to say nothing of their regard, for Edwin, the astute and successful man of business, was obvious and genuine. The two brothers Orgreave, amid their possibly superficial splendours of professional men, hinted envy of the stability of Edwin's trade position. And both Janet and Adela, shopping with Hilda, showed her, by those inflections and eyebrow-liftings of which women possess the secret, that the wife of a solid and generous husband had quite as much economic importance in London as in the Five Towns.

Thus when Hilda got into the train at Euston, she had in her head a plan of campaign compared to which the schemes entertained by her on the afternoon of the disastrous servants episode seemed amateurish and incomplete. And also she was like a returning adventurer, carrying back to his savage land the sacred torch of civilisation. She had perceived, as never before, the superior value of the suave and refined social methods of the metropolitan middle-cla.s.ses, compared with the manners of the Five Towns, and it seemed to her, in her new enthusiasm for the art of life, that if she had ever had a difficulty with Edwin, her own clumsiness was to blame. She saw Edwin as an instrument to be played upon, and herself as a virtuoso. In such an att.i.tude was necessarily a condescension. Yet this condescension somehow did not in the least affect the tenderness and the fever of her longing for Edwin. Her excitement grew as the train pa.s.sed across the dusky December plain towards him. She thought of the honesty of his handshake and of his wistful glance. She knew that he was better than any of the people she had left,--either more capable, or more reliable, or more charitable, or all three. She knew that most of the people she had left were at heart sn.o.bs. "Am I getting a sn.o.b?" she asked herself. She had asked herself the question before. "I don't care if it is sn.o.bbishness. I want certain things, and I will have them, and they can call it what they like." Like the majority of women, she was incapable of being frightened by the names of her desires. She might be sn.o.bbish in one part of her, but in another she had the fiercest scorn for all that Ealing stood for. And in Edwin she admired nothing more than the fact that success had not modified his politics, which were as downright as they had ever been; she could not honestly say the same for herself; and a.s.suredly the Orgreaves could not say the same for themselves. In politics, Edwin was an inspiration to her.

And when the train entered the fiery zone of industry, and slackened speed amid the squalid twilit streets, and stopped at Knype station in front of a crowd of local lowering faces and mackintoshed and gaitered forms, and the damp chill of the Five Towns came in through the opened door of the compartment, her heart fell, and she regretted the elegance of Ealing. But simultaneously her heart was beating with ecstatic expectation. She saw Edwin's face. It was a local face. He wore mourning. He saw her; his eye lighted; his wistful smile appeared.

"Yes," she thought, "he is the same as my image of him. He is better than any of them. I am safe. What a shame to have left him all alone!

He was quite right--there was no need for it. But I am so impulsive. He must have suffered terribly with those Benbows, and shut out of his own house too." ... His hand thrilled her. In the terrible sincerity and outpouring of her kiss she sought to compensate him for all wrongs past and future. Her joy in being near him again made her tingle. His matter-of-fact calmness pleased her. She thought: "I know him, with his matter-of-fact calmness!" "h.e.l.lo, kid," Edwin addressed George with man-to-man negligence. "Been looking after your mother?" George answered like a Londoner. She had them side by side. It was the fact that George had looked after her. London had matured him; he had picked up a little Ealing. He was past Edwin's shoulder. Indeed he was surprisingly near to being a man. She had both of them. On the platform they surrounded her with their masculine protection. George's secret deep respect for Edwin was not hidden from her.

And yet, all the time, in her joy, reliance, love, admiration, eating him with her eyes, she was condescending to Edwin,--because she had plans for his good. She knew better than he did what would be for his good. And he was a provincial and didn't suspect it. "My poor boy!" she had said gleefully in the cab, pulling suddenly at a loose b.u.t.ton of the old grey coat which he wore surrept.i.tiously under his new black overcoat. "My poor boy, what a state you are in!" implying in her tone of affectionate raillery that without her he was a lost man. Through this loose b.u.t.ton, she was his mother, his good angel, his saviour. The trifle had led to a general visitation of his wardrobe, conducted by her with metropolitan skill in humouring his susceptibilities.

Edwin now tried on the new office-coat with the self-consciousness that none but an odious dandy can avoid on such occasions.

"It seems warmer than it used to be," he said, pleased to have her beholding him and interesting herself in him, especially in his office.

Her presence there, unless it happened to arouse his jealousy for his business independence, always pleasurably excited him. Her m.u.f.f on the desk had the air of being the m.u.f.f of a woman who was amorously interested in him, but his relations with whom were not regularised by the law or the church.

"Yes," said she. "I've put some wash-leather inside the lining at the back."

"Why?"

"Well, didn't you say you felt the cold from the window, and it's bad for your liver?"

Her glance said:

"Am I not a clever woman?"

And his replied:

"You are."

"That's the end of that, I hope, darling," she remarked, picking up the old office-coat and dropping it with charming affected disgust into the waste-paper basket.

He shouted for the clerk, who entered with some letters for signature.

Under the eyes of his wife Edwin signed them with the demeanour of a secretary of state signing the destiny of provinces, while the clerk respectfully waited.

"I've asked Maggie to come up for the week-end," said Hilda carelessly, when they were alone together, and Edwin was straightening the desk preparatory to departure.

Since her return she had become far more friendly with Maggie than ever before,--not because Maggie had revealed any new charm, but because she saw in Maggie a victim of injustice. Nothing during the week had more severely tested Hilda's new methods of intercourse with Edwin than the disclosure of the provisions of Auntie Hamps's will, which she had at once and definitely set down as monstrous. She simply could not comprehend Edwin's calm acceptance of them, and a month earlier she would have been bitter about it. It was not (she was convinced) that she coveted money, but that she hated unfairness. Why should the Benbows have all Auntie Hamps's possessions, and Edwin and Maggie, who had done a thousand times more for her than the Benbows, nothing?

Hilda's conversation implied that the Benbows ought to be ashamed of themselves, and when Edwin pointed out that their good luck was not their fault, only a miracle of self-control had enabled her to say nicely: "That's quite true," instead of sneering: "That's you all over, Edwin!" When she learnt that Edwin would receive not a penny for his labours as executor and trustee for the Benbow children, she was speechless. Perceiving that he did not care for her to discourse upon what she considered to be the wrong done to him, she discoursed upon the wrong done to Maggie--Maggie who was already being deprived by the wicked Albert of interest due to her. And Edwin had to agree with her about Maggie's case. It appeared that Maggie also agreed with her about Maggie's case. As for the Benbows, Hilda had not deigned to say one word to them on the matter. A look, a tone, a silence, had sufficed to express the whole of Hilda's mind to those Benbows.

"Oh!" said Edwin. "So Maggie's coming for the week-end, is she? Well, that's not a bad scheme." He knew that Maggie had been very helpful about servants, and that, the second servant having not yet arrived, she would certainly do much more work in the house than she "made." He pictured her and Hilda becoming still more intimate as they turned sheets and blankets and shook pillows on opposite sides of beds, and he was glad.

"Yes," said Hilda. "I've called there this morning."

"And what's she doing with Minnie?"

"We've settled all that," said Hilda proudly. Edwin had told her in detail the whole story of Minnie, and she had behaved exactly as he had antic.i.p.ated. Her championship of Minnie had been as pa.s.sionate as her ruthless verdict upon Minnie's dead mistress. "The girl's aunt was there when I called. We've settled she is to go to Stone, and Maggie and I shall do something for her, and when it's all over I may take her on as housemaid. Maggie says she probably wouldn't make a bad housemaid.

Anyhow it's all arranged for the present."

"Then Maggie'll be without a servant?"

"No, she won't. We shall manage that. Besides, I suppose Maggie won't stay on in that house all by herself for ever! ... It's just the right size, I see."

"Just!" said Edwin.

He was spreading over his desk a dust-sheet with a red scolloped edging which Hilda had presented to him three days earlier.

She gazed at him with composed and justifiable self-satisfaction, as if saying: "Leave absolutely to me everything in my department, and see how smooth your life will be!"

He would never praise her, and she had a very healthy appet.i.te for praise, which appet.i.te always went hungry. But now, instead of resenting his n.i.g.g.ardly reserve, she said to herself: "Poor boy! He can't bring himself to pay compliments; that's it. But his eyes are full of delicious compliments." She was happy, even if apprehensive for the immediate future. There she was, established and respected in his office, which was his church and the successful rival of her boudoir.

Her plans were progressing.

She approached the real business of her call:

"I was thinking we might have gone over to see Ingpen this afternoon."

"Well, let's."

Ingpen, convalescent, had insisted, two days earlier, on being removed to his own house, near the village of Stockbrook, a few miles south of Axe. The departure was a surprising example of the mere power of volition on the part of a patient. The routine of hospital life had exasperated the recovering soul of this priest of freedom to such a point that doctor, matron, and friends had had to yield to a mere instinct.

"There's no decent train to go, and none at all to come back until nearly nine o'clock. And we can't cycle in this weather--at least I can't, especially in the dark."

"Well, what about Sunday?"

"The Sunday trains are worse."