These Twain Part 22

They were more effective than the best arguments or the most graceful articulate surrenders. Thus she completed her triumph. But whether the virtue of the kisses lay in their sensuousness or in their sentiment, neither he nor she knew. And she did not care.... She did not kiss him with abandonment. There was a reserve in her kisses, and in her smile.

Indeed she went on kissing him rather sternly. Her glance, when their eyes were very close together, was curious. It seemed to imply: "We are in love. And we love. I am yours. You are mine. Life is very fine after all. I am a happy woman. But still--_each is for himself in this world_, and that's the bedrock of marriage as of all other inst.i.tutions." Her sense of realities again! And she went on kissing, irresistibly.

"Kiss me."

And he had to kiss her.

Whereupon she softened to him, and abandoned herself to the emanations of his charm, and her lips became almost liquid as she kissed him again; nevertheless there was still a slight reserve in her kisses.

At tea she chattered like a magpie, as the saying is. Between her and George there seemed to be a secret instinctive understanding that Edwin had to be humoured, enlivened, drawn into talk,--for although he had kissed her, his mood was yet by no means restored to the normal. He would have liked to remain, majestic, within the tent of his soul. But they were too clever for him. Then, to achieve his discomfiture, entered Johnnie Orgreave, with a suggestion that they should all four--Edwin, Hilda, Janet, and himself--go to the theatre at Hanbridge that night. Hilda accepted the idea instantly. Since her marriage, her appet.i.te for pleasure had developed enormously. At moments she was positively greedy for pleasure. She was incapable of being bored at the theatre, she would sooner be in the theatre of a night than out of it.

"Oh! Do let's go!" she cried.

Edwin did not want to go, but he had to concur. He did not want to be pleasant to Johnnie Orgreave or to anybody, but he had to be pleasant.

"Be on the first car that goes up after seven fifteen," said Johnnie as he was departing.

Edwin grunted.

"You understand, Teddy? The first car that goes up after seven fifteen."

"All right! All right!"

Blithely Hilda went to beautify herself. And when she had beautified herself and made herself into a queen of whom the haughtiest master-printer might be proud, she despatched Ada for Master George.

And Master George had to come to her bedroom.

"Let me look at that leg," she said. "Sit down."

Devious creature! During tea she had not even divulged that she had heard of the damaged s.h.i.+n. Master George was taken by surprise. He sat down. She knelt, and herself unloosed the stocking and exposed the little calf. The place was black and blue, but it had a healthy look.

"It's nothing," she said.

And then, all in her splendid finery, she kissed the dirty discoloured s.h.i.+n. Strange! He was only two years old and just learning to talk.

"Now then, missis! Here's the tram!" Edwin yelled out loudly, roughly, from below. He would have given a sovereign to see her miss the car, but his inconvenient sense of justice forced him to warn her.

"Coming! Coming!"

She kissed Master George on the mouth eagerly, and George seemed, unusually, to return the eagerness. She ran down the darkening stairs, ecstatic.

In the dusky road, Edwin curtly signalled to the vast ascending steam-car, and it stopped. Those were in the old days, when people did what they liked with the cars, stopping them here and stopping them there according to their fancy. The era of electricity and fixed stopping-places, and soulless, conscienceless control from London had not set in. Edwin and Hilda mounted. Two hundred yards further on the steam-tram was once more arrested, and Johnnie and Janet joined them.

Hilda was in the highest spirits. The great affair of the afternoon had not been a quarrel, but an animating experience which, though dangerous, intensified her self-confidence and her zest.

CHAPTER IX

THE WEEK-END

I

The events of the portentous week-end which included the musical evening began early on the Sat.u.r.day, and the first one was a chance word uttered by George.

Breakfast was nearly over in the Clayhanger dining-room. Hilda sat opposite to Edwin, and George between them. They had all eaten with appet.i.te, and the disillusion which usually accompanies the satisfaction of desire was upon them. They had looked forward to breakfast, scenting with zest its pleasing odours, and breakfast was over, save perhaps for a final unnecessary piece of toast or half a cup of chilled coffee.

Hilda did not want to move, because she did not care for the Sat.u.r.day morning task of shopping and re-victualling and being bland with fellow-shoppers in the emporiums. The house-doors were too frequently open on Sat.u.r.day mornings, and errand-boys thereat, and a wind blowing through the house, and it was the morning for specially cleaning the hall--detestable and damp operation--and servants seemed loose on Sat.u.r.day morning, and dinner was apt to be late. But Hilda knew she would have to move. To postpone was only to aggravate. Destiny grasped her firm. George was not keen about moving, because he had no plan of campaign; the desolating prospect of resuming school on Monday had withered his energy; he was in a mood to be either a martyr or a villain. Edwin was lazily sardonic, partly because the leisure of breakfast was at an end, partly because he hated the wage-paying slackness of Sat.u.r.day morning at the shop, and partly because his relations with Hilda had remained indefinite and disquieting, despite a thousand mutual urbanities and thoughtful refinements, and even some caresses. A sense of aimlessness dejected him; and in the central caves of his brain the question was mysteriously stirring: What is the use of all these things,--success, dignity, importance, luxury, love, sensuality, order, moral superiority? He foresaw thirty years of breakfasts, with plenty of the finest home-cured bacon and fresh eggs, but no romance.

Before his marriage he used to read the paper honestly and rudely at breakfast. That is to say, he would prop it up squarely in front of him, hiding his sister Maggie, and anyhow ignoring her; and Maggie had to "like it or lump it"; she probably lumped it. But upon marriage he had become a chevalier; he had n.o.bly decided that it was not correct to put a newspaper between yourself and a woman who had denied you nothing.

Nevertheless, his appet.i.te for newspapers being almost equal to his appet.i.te for bacon, he would still take nips at the newspaper during breakfast, hold it in one hand, glance at it, drop it, pick it up, talk amiably while glancing at it, drop it, pick it up again. So long as the newspaper was held aside and did not touch the table, so long as he did not read more than ten lines at a time, he considered that punctilio was satisfied, and that he was not in fact reading the newspaper at all.

But towards the end of breakfast, when the last food was disappearing, and he had lapped the cream off the news, he would hold the newspaper in both hands--and brazenly and conscientiously read. His chief interest, just then, was political. Like most members of his party, he was endeavouring to decipher the party programme and not succeeding, and he feared for his party and was a little ashamed for it. Grave events had occurred. The substructure of the state was rocking. A newly elected supporter of the Government, unaware that he was being admitted to the best club in London, had gone to the House of Commons in a tweed cap and preceded by a bra.s.s-band. Serious pillars of society knew that the time had come to invest their savings abroad. Edwin, with many another ardent liberal, was seeking to persuade himself that everything was all right after all. The domestic atmosphere--Hilda's baffling face, the emptied table, the shadow of business, repletion, early symptoms of indigestion, the sound of a slop-pail in the hall--did not aid him to optimism. In brief the morning was a fair specimen of a kind of morning that seemed likely to be for him an average morning.

"Can't I leave the table, mother?" asked George discontentedly.

Hilda nodded.

George gave a coa.r.s.e sound of glee.

"George! ... That's so unlike you!" his mother frowned.

Instead of going directly towards the door, he must needs pa.s.s right round the table, behind the chair of his occupied uncle. As he did so, he scanned the newspaper and read out loudly in pa.s.sing for the benefit of the room:

"'Local Divorce Case. Etches v. Etches. Painful details.'"

The words meant nothing to George. They had happened to catch his eye.

He read them as he might have read an extract from the books of Euclid, and noisily and ostentatiously departed, not without a further protest from Hilda.

And Edwin and Hilda, left alone together, were self-conscious.

"Lively kid!" murmured Edwin self-consciously.

And Hilda, self-consciously:

"You never told me that case was on."

"I didn't know till I saw it here."

"What's the result?"

"Not finished.... Here you are, if you want to read it."

He handed the sheet across the table. Despite his serious interest in politics he had read the report before anything else. Etches v. Etches, indeed, surpa.s.sed Gladstonian politics as an aid to the dubious prosperity of the very young morning newspaper, which represented the latest and most original attempt to challenge the journalistic monopoly of the afternoon _Staffords.h.i.+re Signal_. It lived scarcely longer than the divorce case, for the proprietors, though Non-conformists and therefore astute, had failed to foresee that the Five Towns public would not wait for racing results until the next morning.

"Thanks," Hilda amiably and negligently murmured.

Edwin hummed.

Useless for Hilda to take that casual tone! Useless for Edwin to hum!