Part 40 (1/2)

”I'm sorry,” said Ingpen, keeping his temper. ”I think I ought to have left a little earlier. Good-bye, Ed. Mrs. Hamps--” He bowed with extreme urbanity to the ladies, and departed.

Shortly afterwards Auntie Hamps also departed, saying that she must not be late for tea at dear Clara's. She was secretly panting to disclose the whole situation to dear Clara. What a scene had Clara missed by leaving the works too soon!

CHAPTER XII

DARTMOOR

I

”What was that telegram you had this afternoon, Hilda?”

The question was on Edwin's tongue as he walked up Acre Lane from the works by his wife's side. But it did not achieve utterance. A year had pa.s.sed since he last walked up Acre Lane with Hilda; and now of course he recalled the anger of that previous promenade. In the interval he had acquired to some extent the habit of containing his curiosity and his criticism. In the interval he had triumphed, but Hilda also had consolidated her position, so that despite the increase of his prestige she was still his equal; she seemed to take strength from him in order to maintain the struggle against him.

During the final half-hour at the works the great, the enormous problem in his mind had been--not whether such and such a plan of action for Janet's welfare in a very grave crisis would be advisable, but whether he should demand an explanation from Hilda of certain disquieting phenomena in her boudoir. In the excitement of his indecision Janet's tragic case scarcely affected his sensibility. For about twelve months Hilda had, he knew, been intermittently carrying on a correspondence as to which she had said no word to him; she did not precisely conceal it, but she failed to display it. Lately, so far as his observation went, it had ceased. And then to-day he had caught sight of an orange telegraph-envelope in her wastepaper basket. Alone in the boudoir, and glancing back cautiously and guiltily at the door, he had picked up the little ball of paper and smoothed it out, and read the words: ”Mrs.

Edwin Clayhanger.” In those days the wives of even prominent business men did not customarily receive such a rain of telegrams that the delivery of a telegram would pa.s.s unmentioned and be forgotten. On the contrary, the delivery of a telegram was an event in a woman's life.

The telegram which he had detected might have been innocently negligible, in forty different ways. It might, for example, have been from Janet, or about a rehearsal of the Choral Society, or from a tradesman at Oldcastle, or about rooms at the seaside. But supposing that it was not innocently negligible? Supposing that she was keeping a secret? ... What secret? What conceivable secret? He could conceive no secret. Yes, he could conceive a secret. He had conceived and did conceive a secret, and his private thoughts elaborated it.... He had said to himself at the works: ”I may ask her as we go home. I shall see.” But, out in the street, with the disturbing sense of her existence over his shoulder, he knew that he should not ask her. Partly timidity and partly pride kept him from asking. He knew that, as a wise husband, he ought to ask. He knew that commonsense was not her strongest quality, and that by diffidence he might be inviting unguessed future trouble; but he would not ask. In the great, pa.s.sionate war of marriage they would draw thus apart, defensive and watchful, rus.h.i.+ng together at intervals either to fight or to kiss. The heat of their kisses had not cooled; but to him at any rate the kisses often seemed intensely illogical; for, though he regarded himself as an improving expert in the science of life, he had not yet begun to perceive that those kisses were the only true logic of their joint career.

He was conscious of grievances against her as they walked up Acre Lane, but instead of being angrily resentful, he was content judicially to register the grievances as further corroboration of his estimate of her character. They were walking up Acre Lane solely because Hilda was Hilda. A year ago they had walked up Acre Lane in order that Edwin might call at the shop. But Acre Lane was by no means on the shortest way from Shawport to Bleakridge. Hilda, however, on emerging from the works, full of trouble concerning Janet, had suddenly had the beautiful idea of buying some fish for tea. In earlier days he would have said: ”How accidental you are! What would have happened to our tea if you hadn't been down here, or if you hadn't by chance thought of fish?” He would have tried to show her that her activities were not based in the principles of reason, and that even the composition of meals ought not to depend upon the hazard of an impulse. Now, wiser, he said not a word. He resigned himself in silence to an extra three-quarters of a mile of walking. In such matters, where her deep instinctiveness came into play, she had established over him a definite ascendancy.

Then another grievance was that she had sent George to Hanbridge, knowing that George, according to a solemn family engagement, ought to have been at the works. She was conscienceless. A third grievance, naturally, was her behaviour to Ingpen. And a fourth came back again to George. Why had she sent George to Hanbridge at all? Was it not to despatch a telegram which she was afraid to submit to the inquisitiveness of the Post Office at Bursley? A daring supposition, but plausible; and if correct, of what duplicity was she not guilty!

The mad, shameful episode of Johnnie Orgreave, the awful dilemma of Janet--colossal affairs though they were--interested him less and less as he grew more and more preoccupied with his relations to Hilda. And he thought, not caring:

”Something terrific will occur between us, one of these days.”

And then his bravado would turn to panic.

II

They pa.s.sed along Wedgwood Street, and Hilda preceded him into the chief poulterer-and-fishmonger's. Here was another slight grievance of Edwin's; for the chief poulterer-and-fishmonger's happened now to be the Clayhanger shop at the corner of Wedgwood Street and Duck Bank.

Positively there had been compet.i.tors for the old location! Why should Hilda go there and drag him there? Could she not comprehend that he had a certain fine delicacy about entering? ... The place where the former sign had been was plainly visible on the brickwork above the shop-front.

Rabbits, fowl, and a few brace of grouse hung in the right-hand window, from which most of the gla.s.s had been removed; and in the left, upon newly-embedded slabs of Sicilian marble, lay amid ice the curved forms of many fish, and behind them was the fat white-sleeved figure of the chief poulterer-and-fishmonger's wife with her great, wet hands. He was sad. He seriously thought yet again: ”Things are not what they were in this town, somehow.” For this place had once been a printer's; and he had a conviction that printing was an aristocrat among trades. Indeed, could printing and fishmongering be compared?

The saleswoman greeted them with deference, calling Edwin ”sir,” and yet with a certain complacent familiarity, as an occupant to ex-occupants.

Edwin casually gave the short shake of the head which in the district may signify ”Good-day,” and turned, humming, to look at the hanging game. It seemed to him that he could only keep his dignity as a man of the world by looking at the grouse with a connoisseur's eye. Why didn't Hilda buy grouse? The shop was a poor little interior. It smelt ill.

He wondered what the upper rooms were like, and what had happened to the decrepit building at the end of the yard. The saleswoman slapped the fish about on the marble, and running water could be heard.

”Edwin,” said Hilda, with enchanting sweetness and simplicity, ”would you like hake or turbot, dear?”

Impossible to divine from her voice that the ruin of their two favourite Orgreaves was complete, that she was conducting a secret correspondence, and that she had knowingly and deliberately offended her husband!

Both women waited, moveless, for the decision, as for an august decree.

When the transaction was finished, the saleswoman handed over the parcel into Hilda's gloved hands; it was a rough-and-ready parcel, not at all like the neat stiff paper-bag of the modern age.

”Very hot, isn't it, ma'am?” said the saleswoman.