Clayhanger Part 76

Before, was the open malignant sea. Close behind, on their eminence, the hotels rose in vast cubes of yellow light, moveless, secure, strangely confident that nothing sinister could happen to them.

Edwin was aware of emotion. The feel of his overcoat-collar upturned against the chin was friendly to him amid that onset of the pathos of the human world. He climbed back to the promenade. Always at the bottom of his mind, the foundation of all the s.h.i.+fting structures in his mind, was the consciousness of his exact geographical relation to Preston Street. He walked westwards along the promenade. "Why am I doing this?" he asked himself again and again. "Why don't I go home? I must be mad to be doing this." Still his legs carried him on, past lamp-post after lamp-post of the wind-driven promenade, now almost deserted. And presently the high lighted windows of the grandest hotels were to be seen, cut like square holes in the sky; and then the pier, which had flung a string of lanterns over the waves into the storm; and opposite the pier a dark empty s.p.a.ce and a rectangle of gas-lamps: Regency Square. He crossed over, and pa.s.sed up the Square, and out of it by a tiny side street, at hazard, and lo! he was in Preston Street.

He went hot and cold.

SEVEN.

Well, and what then? Preston Street was dark and lonely. The wind charged furiously through it, panting towards the downs. He was in Preston Street, but what could he do? She was behind the black walls of one of those houses. But what then? Could he knock at the door in the night and say: "I've come. I don't know why?"

He said: "I shall walk up and down this street once, and then I shall go back to the hotel. That's the only thing to do. I've gone off my head, that's what's the matter with me! I ought to have written to her. Why in the name of G.o.d didn't I begin by writing to her? ... Of course I might write to her from the hotel ... send the letter by messenger, to-night ... or early to-morrow. Yes, that's what I'll do."

He set himself to make the perambulation of the street. Many of the numbers were painted on the fanlights over the doors and showed plain against illumination. Suddenly he saw the large figures '59.' He was profoundly stirred. He had said that the matter with him was that he had gone off his head; but now, staring at that number on the opposite side of the street, he really did not know what was the matter with him.

He might have been dying. The front of the house was dark save for the fanlight He crossed over and peered down into the area and at the black door. A bra.s.s plate: "Cannon's Boarding-House," he could read. He perspired. It seemed to him that he could see her within the house, mysteriously moving at her feminine tasks. Or did she lie in bed? He had come from Bursley to London, from London to Brighton, and now he had found her portal; it existed. The adventure seemed incredible in its result. Enough for the present! He could stand no more. He walked away, meaning not to return.

When he returned, five minutes later, the fanlight was dark. Had she, in the meantime, come into the hall of the house and extinguished the gas? Strange, that all lights should be out in a boarding establishment before ten o'clock! He stood hesitant quite near the house, holding himself against the wind. Then the door opened a little, as it were stealthily, and a hand and arm crept out and with a cloth polished the face of the bra.s.s plate. He thought, in his excited fancy, that it was her hand and arm. Within, he seemed to distinguish a dim figure. He did not move; could not. The door opened wider, and the figure stood revealed, a woman's. Surely it was she! She gazed at him suspiciously, duster in hand.

"What are you standing there for?" she questioned inimically. "We've had enough of loiterers in this street. Please go away."

She took him for a knave expectant of some chance to maraud. She was not fearful, however. It was she. It was her voice.

VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER FOUR.

IN PRESTON STREET.

He said, "I happened to be in Brighton, so I thought I'd just call, and--I thought I'd just call."

She stared at him, frowning, in the dim diffused light of the street.

"I've been seeing your little boy," he said. "I thought perhaps as I was here you'd like to know how he was getting on."

"Why," she exclaimed, with seeming bitterness, "you've grown a beard!"

"Yes," he admitted foolishly, apologetically.

"We can't stand here in this wind," she said, angry with the wind, which was indeed blowing her hair about, and her skirts and her duster.

She did not in words invite him to enter, but she held the door more widely open and drew back for him to pa.s.s. He went in. She closed the door with a bang and rattle of large old-fas.h.i.+oned latches, locks, and chains, and the storm was excluded. They were in the dark of the hall.

"Wait till I put my hand on the matches," she said. Then she struck a match, which revealed a common oil-lamp, with a reservoir of yellow gla.s.s and a paper shade. She raised the chimney and lit the lamp, and regulated the wick.

Edwin kept silence. The terrible constraint which had half paralysed him when Janet first mentioned Hilda, seized him again. He stood near the woman who without a word of explanation or regret had jilted, outraged, and ruined him ten years before; this was their first meeting after their kisses in his father's shop. And yet she was not on her knees, nor in tears, nor stammering an appeal for forgiveness. It was rather he who was apologetic, who sought excuses. He felt somehow like a criminal, or at least like one who commits an enormous indiscretion.

The harsh curves of her hair were the same. Her thick eyebrows were the same. Her blazing glance was the same. Her intensely clear intonation was the same. But she was a profoundly changed woman. Even in his extreme perturbation he could be sure of that. As, bending under the lamp-shade to arrange the wick, she exposed her features to the bright light, Edwin saw a face marred by anxiety and grief and time, the face of a mature woman, with no lingering pretension to girlishness. She was thirty-four, and she looked older than Maggie, and much older than Janet. She was embittered. Her black dress was shabby and untidy, her finger-nails irregular, discoloured, and damaged. The aspect of her pained Edwin acutely. It seemed to him a poignant shame that time and sorrow and misfortune could not pa.s.s over a young girl's face and leave no mark. When he recalled what she had been, comparing the woman with the delicious wistful freshness of the girl that lived unaltered in his memory, he was obliged to clear his throat. The contrast was too pathetic to be dwelt on. Only with the woman before him did he fully appreciate the exquisite innocent simplicity of the girl. In the day of his pa.s.sion Hilda had not seemed to him very young, very simple, very wistful. On the contrary she had seemed to have much of the knowledge and the temper of a woman.

Having at length subjugated the wick, she straightened her back, with a gesture that he knew, and for one instant she was a girl again.

TWO.

"Will you come this way?" she said coldly, holding the lamp in front of her, and opening a door.

At the same moment another door opened at the far end of the hall; there was a heavy footstep; a great hand and arm showed, and then Edwin had a glimpse of a man's head and shoulders emerging from an oblong flickering firelight.

Hilda paused. "All right," she called to the man, who at once disappeared, shutting the door and leaving darkness where he had been.

The large shadows cast by Hilda's lamp now had the gaunt hall to themselves again.

"Don't be alarmed," she laughed harshly. "It's only the broker's man."

Edwin was tongue-tied. If Hilda were joking, what answer could be made to such a pleasantry in such a situation? And if she were speaking the truth, if the bailiffs really were in possession...! His life seemed to him once again astoundingly romantic. He had loved this woman, conquered her. And now she was a mere acquaintance, and he was following her stiffly into the recesses of a strange and sinister abode peopled by mysterious men. Was this a Brighton boarding-house? It resembled nothing reputable in his experience. All was incomprehensible.

The room into which she led him was evidently the dining-room. Not s.p.a.cious, perhaps not quite so large as his own dining-room, it was nearly filled by one long bare table. Eight or ten monotonous chairs were ranged round the grey walls. In the embrasure of the window was a wicker stand with a withered plant on its summit, and at the other end of the room a walnut sideboard in the most horrible taste. The mantelpiece was draped with dark knotted and rosetted cloth; within the fender stood a small paper screen. The walls were hung with ancient and with fairly modern engravings, some big, others little, some coloured, others in black-and-white, but all distressing in their fatuous ugliness. The ceiling seemed black. The whole room fulfilled pretty accurately the scornful scrupulous housewife's notion of a lodging-house interior. It was suspect. And in Edwin there was a good deal of the housewife. He was appalled. Obviously the house was small--he had known that from the outside--and the entire enterprise insignificant.

This establishment was not in the King's Road, nor on the Marine Parade, nor at Hove; no doubt hundreds of such little places existed precariously in a vast town like Brighton. Widows, of course, were often in straits. And Janet had told him... Nevertheless he was appalled, and completely at a loss to reconcile Hilda with her environment. And then--"the broker's man!"

At her bidding he sat down, in his overcoat, with his hat insecure on his knee, and observed, under the lamp, the dust on the surface of the long table. Hilda seated herself opposite, so that the lamp was between them, hiding him from her by its circle of light. He wondered what Maggie would have thought, and what Clara would have said, could they have seen him in that obscurity.

THREE.

"So you've seen my boy?" she began, with no softening of tone.

"Yes, Janet Orgreave brought him in one morning--the other day. He didn't seem to me to be so ill as all that."

"Ill!" she exclaimed. "He certainly wasn't ill when he left here. But he had been. And the doctor said that this air didn't suit him--it never had suited him. It doesn't suit some folks, you know--people can say what they like."

"Anyhow, he's a lively piece--no mistake about that!"

"When he's well, he's very well," said George's mother. "But he's up and down in a minute. And on the whole he's been on the poorly side."

He noticed that, though there was no relapse from the correctness of her accent, she was using just such phrases as she might have used had she never quitted her native Turnhill. He looked round the lamp at her furtively, and seemed to see in her shadowed face a particular local quality of sincerity and downrightness that appealed strongly to his admiration. (Yet ten years earlier he had considered her markedly foreign to the Five Towns.) That this quality should have survived in her was a proof to him that she was a woman unique. Unique she had been, and unique she still remained. He did not know that he had long ago lost for ever the power of seeing her with a normal vision. He imagined in his simplicity, which disguised itself as chill critical impartiality, that he was adding her up with clear-sighted shrewdness...

And then she was a mother! That meant a mysterious, a mystic perfecting! For him, it was as if among all women she alone had been a mother--so special was his view of the influence of motherhood upon her.

He drew together all the beauty of an experience almost universal, transcendentalised it, and centred it on one being. And he was disturbed, baffled, agitated by the effect of the secret workings of his own unsuspected emotion. He was made sad, and sadder. He wanted to right wrongs, to efface from hearts the memory of grief, to create bliss; and he knew that this could never be done. He now saw Hilda exclusively as a victim, whose misfortunes were innumerable. Imagine this creature, with her pa.s.sion for Victor Hugo, obliged by circ.u.mstances to polish a bra.s.s door-plate surrept.i.tiously at night!

Imagine her solitary in the awful house--with the broker's man! Imagine her forced to separate herself from her child! Imagine the succession of disasters that had soured her and transformed seriousness into harshness and acridity! ... And within that envelope, what a soul must be burning!

"And when he begins to grow--he's scarcely begun to grow yet," Hilda continued about her offspring, "then he will reed all his strength!"

"Yes, he will," Edwin concurred heartily.

He wanted to ask her, "Why did you call him Edwin for his second name?

Was it his father's name, or your father's, or did you insist on it yourself, because?" But he could not ask. He could ask nothing. He could not even ask why she had jilted him without a word. He knew naught, and evidently she was determined to give no information. She might at any rate have explained how she had come to meet Janet, and under what circ.u.mstances Janet had taken possession of the child. All was a mystery. Her face, when he avoided the lamp, shone in the midst of a huge dark cloud of impenetrable mystery. She was too proud to reveal anything whatever. The grand pride in her forbade her even to excuse her conduct to himself. A terrific woman!

FOUR.

Silence fell. His constraint was excruciating. She too was nervous, tapping the table and creaking her chair. He could not speak.