Hilda Lessways Part 20

Now the girls arrived at the commencement of the steam-car track, where a huge engine and tram were waiting, and as they turned another corner, the long perspective of Trafalgar Road, rising with its double row of lamps towards fas.h.i.+onable Bleakridge, was revealed to Hilda. She thought, naturally, that every other part of the Five Towns was more impressive and more important than the poor little outskirt, Turnhill, of her birth. In Turnhill there was no thoroughfare to compare with Trafalgar Road, and no fas.h.i.+onable suburb whatever. She had almost the feeling of being in a metropolis, if a local metropolis.

"It's beginning to rain, I think," said Janet.

"Who's that?" Hilda questioned abruptly, ignoring the remark in the swift, unreflecting excitement of a sensibility surprised.

"Where?"

"There!"

They were going down Duck Bank into the hollow. On the right, opposite the lighted Dragon Hotel, lay Duck Square in obscure somnolence; at the corner of Duck Square and Trafalgar Road was a double-fronted shop, of which all the shutters were up except two or three in the centre of the doorway. Framed thus in the aperture, a young man stood within the shop under a bright central gas-jet; he was gazing intently at a large sheet of paper which he held in his outstretched hands, and the girls saw him in profile: tall, rather lanky, fair, with hair dishevelled, and a serious, studious, and magnanimous face; quite unconscious that he made a picture for unseen observers.

"That?" said Janet, in a confidential and interested tone. "That's young Clayhanger--Edwin Clayhanger.[1] His father's the printer, you know.

Came from Turnhill, originally."

"I never knew," said Hilda. "But I seem to have heard the name."

"Oh! It must have been a long time ago. He's got the best business in Bursley now. Father says it's one of the best in the Five Towns. He's built that new house just close to ours. Don't you remember I pointed it out to you? Father's the architect. They're going to move into it next week or the week after. I expect that's why the son and heir's working so late to-night, packing and so on, perhaps."

The young man moved out of sight. But his face had made in those few thrilling seconds a deep impression on Hilda; so that in her mind she still saw it, with an almost physical particularity of detail. It presented itself to her, in some mysterious way, as a romantic visage, wistful, full of sad subtleties, of the unknown and the seductive, and of a latent benevolence. It was as recondite and as sympathetic as the town in which she had discovered it.

She said nothing.

"Old Mr. Clayhanger is a regular character," Janet eagerly went on, to Hilda's great content. "Some people don't like him. But I rather do like him." She was always thus kind. "Grandmother once told me he sprang from simply nothing at all--worked on a potbank when he was quite a child."

"Who? The father, you mean?"

"Yes, the father. Now, goodness knows how much he isn't worth I Father is always saying he could buy _us_ up, lock, stock, and barrel." Janet laughed. "People often call him a miser, but he can't be so much of a miser, seeing that he's built this new house."

"And I suppose the son's in the business?"

"Yes. He wanted to be an architect. That was how father got to know him.

But old Mr. Clayhanger wouldn't have it. And so he's a printer, and one day he'll be one of the princ.i.p.al men in the town."

"Oh! So you know him?"

"Well, we do and we don't. I go into the shop sometimes; and then I've seen him once or twice up at the new house. We've asked him to come in and see us. But he's never come, and I don't think he ever will. I believe his father does keep him grinding away rather hard. I'm sure he's frightfully clever."

"How can you tell?"

"Oh! From bits of things he says. And he's read everything, it seems!

And once he saved a great heavy printing-machine from going through the floor of the printing-shop into the bas.e.m.e.nt. If it hadn't been for him there'd have been a dreadful accident. Everybody was talking about that.

He doesn't look it, does he?"

They were now pa.s.sing the corner at which stood the shop. Hilda peered within the narrowing, unshuttered slit, but she could see no more of Edwin Clayhanger.

"No, he doesn't," she agreed, while thinking nevertheless that he did look precisely that. "And so he lives all alone with his father. No mother?"

"No mother. But there are two sisters. The youngest is married, and just going to have a baby, poor thing! The other one keeps house. I believe she's a splendid girl, but neither of them is a bit like Edwin. Not a bit. He's--"

"What?"

"I don't know. Look here, miss! What about this rain? I vote we take the car up the hill."

IV

The steam-car was rumbling after them down Duck Bank. It stopped, huge above them, and they climbed into it through an odour of warm grease that trailed from the engine. The conductor touched his hat to Janet, who smiled like a sister upon this fellow-being. Two middle-aged men were the only other occupants of the interior of the car; both raised their hats to Janet. The girls sat down in opposite corners next to the door. Then, with a deafening continuous clatter of loose gla.s.s-panes and throbbing of its filthy floor, the vehicle started again, elephantine.

It was impossible to talk in that unique din. Hilda had no desire to talk. She watched Janet pay the fares as in a dream, without even offering her own penny, though as a rule she was touchily punctilious in sharing expenses with the sumptuous Janet. Without being in the least aware of it, and quite innocently, Janet had painted a picture of the young man, Edwin Clayhanger, which intensified a hundredfold the strong romantic piquancy of Hilda's brief vision of him. In an instant Hilda saw her ideal future--that future which had loomed grandiose, indefinite, and strange--she saw it quite precise and simple as the wife of such a creature as Edwin Clayhanger. The change was astounding in its abruptness. She saw all the delightful and pure vistas of love with a man, subtle, baffling, and benevolent, and above all superior; with a man who would be respected by a whole town as a pillar of society, while bringing to his intimacy with herself an exotic and wistful quality which neither she nor anyone could possibly define. She asked: "What attracts me in him? I don't know. _I like him_." She who had never spoken to him! She who never before had vividly seen herself as married to a man! He was clever; he was sincere; he was kind; he was trustworthy; he would have wealth and importance and reputation. All this was good; but all this would have been indifferent to her, had there not been an enigmatic and inscrutable and unprecedented something in his face, in his bearing, which challenged and inflamed her imagination.

It did not occur to her to think of Janet as in the future a married woman. But of herself she thought, with new agitations: "I am innocent now! I am ignorant now! I am a girl now! But one day I shall be so no longer. One day I shall be a woman. One day I shall be in the power and possession of some man--if not this man, then some other. Everything happens; and this will happen!" And the hazardous strangeness of life enchanted her.

CHAPTER IV WITH THE ORGREAVES

I

The Orgreave family was holding its nightly session in the large drawing-room of Lane End House when Hilda and Janet arrived. The bow-window stood generously open in three different places, and the heavy outer curtains as well as the lace inner ones were moving gently in the capricious breeze that came across the oval lawn. The mult.i.tudinous sound of rain on leaves entered also with the wind; and a steam-car could be heard thundering down Trafalgar Road, from which the house was separated by only a few intervening minor roofs.

Mrs. Orgreave, the plump, faded image of goodness, with Janet's full red lips and Janet's kindly eyes, sat as usual, whether in winter or in summer, near the fireplace, surveying with placidity the theatre where the innumerable dramas of her motherhood had been enacted. Tom, her eldest, the thin, spectacled lawyer, had, as a boy of seven, rampaged on that identical Turkey hearthrug, when it was new, a quarter of a century earlier. He was now seated at the grand piano with the youngest child, Alicia, a gawky little treasure, always alternating between pertness and timidity, aged twelve. Jimmie and Johnnie, young bloods of nineteen and eighteen, were only present in their mother's heart, being in process of establis.h.i.+ng, by practice, the right to go forth into the world of an evening and return when they chose without suffering too much from family curiosity. Two other children--Marian, eldest daughter and sole furnisher of grandchildren to the family, and Charlie, a young doctor-- were permanently away in London. Osmond Orgreave, the elegant and faintly mocking father of the brood, a handsome grizzled man of between fifty and sixty, was walking to and fro between the grand piano and the small upright piano in the farther half of the room.

"Well, my dear?" said Mrs. Orgreave to Hilda. "You aren't wet?" She drew Hilda towards her and stroked her shoulder, and then kissed her. The embrace was to convey the mother's sympathy with Hilda in the ordeal of the visit to Turnhill, and her satisfaction that the ordeal was now over. The ageing lady seemed to kiss her on behalf of the entire friendly family; all the others, appreciating the delicacy of the situation, refrained from the peril of clumsy speech.

"Oh no, mother!" Janet exclaimed rea.s.suringly. "We came up by car. And I had my umbrella. And it only began to rain in earnest just as we got to the gate."

"Very thoughtful of it, I'm sure!" piped the pig-tailed Alicia from the piano. She could talk, in her pert moments, exactly like her brothers.

"Alicia, darling," said Janet coaxingly, as she sat on the sofa flanked by the hat, gloves, and jacket which she had just taken off, "will you run upstairs with these things, and take Hilda's too? I'm quite exhausted. Father will swoon if I leave them here. I suppose he's walking about because he's so proud of his new birthday slippers."

"But I'm just playing the symphony with Tom!" Alicia protested.

"I'll run up--I was just going to," said Hilda.

"You'll do no such thing!" Mrs. Orgreave announced, sharply. "Alicia, I'm surprised at you! Here Janet and Hilda have been out since noon, and you--"

"And so on and so on," said Alicia, jumping up from the piano in obedience.

"We didn't wait supper," Mrs. Orgreave went on. "But I told Martha to leave--"

"Mother, dearest," Janet stopped her. "Please don't mention food. We've stuffed ourselves, haven't we, Hilda? Anyone been?"

"Swetnam," said Alicia, as she left the room with her arms full.

"_Mr_. Swetnam," corrected Mrs. Orgreave.