Hilda Lessways Part 28

"But--" She stopped, full of misgivings.

"Never heard any gossip about me--never?" he persisted, as it were, menacing her.

She shook her head.

"Never heard that I'm not really a solicitor?"

"Oh! well--I think mother once did say something--"

"I thought so."

"But I don't understand those things," she said simply. "Is anything the matter? Is--"

"Nothing!" he replied, calm and convincing. "Only I've been done! Done!

You'll hear about it some day, I dare say.... Shall I tell you? Would you like me to tell you?" He smiled rather boyishly and leaned back.

"Yes," she nodded.

His att.i.tude was very familiar, recalling their former relation of employer and employed. It seemed as natural to her as to him that he should not too ceremoniously conceal his feelings or disguise his mood.

"Well, you see, I expect I know as much about law as any of 'em, but I've never been admitted, and so--" He stopped, perceiving that she did not comprehend the significance of such a word as 'admitted.' "If you want to practise as a solicitor you have to pa.s.s examinations, and I never have pa.s.sed examinations. Very expensive, all that! And I couldn't afford when I was young. It isn't the exams that are difficult--you may tell that from the fellows that pa.s.s them. Lawton, for instance. But after a certain age exams become a nuisance. However, I could do everything else. I might have had half a dozen situations as managing clerk in the Five Towns if I'd wanted. Only I didn't want! I wanted to be on my own. I could get clients as quick as any of them. _And_ quicker! So I found Karkeek--the excellent Mr. Karkeek! Another of the bright ones that could pa.s.s the exams! Oh! He'd pa.s.sed the exams all right! He'd spent five years and I don't know how many hundred pounds in pa.s.sing the exams, and with it all he couldn't get above a couple of pounds a week. There are hundreds of real solicitors up and down the country who aren't earning more. And they aren't worth more. But I gave him more, and a lot more. Just to use his name on my door and my blinds.

See? In theory I was his clerk, but in reality he was mine. It was all quite clear. He understood--I should think he did, by Jove!" George Cannon laughed shortly. "Every one understood. I got a practice together in no time. _He_ didn't do it. He wouldn't have got a practice together in a thousand years. I had the second-best practice in Turnhill, and I should soon have had the best--if I hadn't been done."

"Yes?" said Hilda. The confidence flattered her.

"Well, Karkeek came into some money,--and he simply walked out of the office! Simply walked out! Didn't give me time to turn round. I'd always treated him properly. But he was jealous."

"What a shame!" Hilda's scorn shrivelled up Mr. Karkeek. There was nothing that she detested so much as a disloyalty.

"Yes. I couldn't stop him, of course. No formal agreement between us.

Couldn't be, in a case like ours! So he had me. He'd taken my wages quick enough as long as it suited him. Then he comes into money, and behaves like that. Jealousy! They were all jealous,--always had been. I was doing too well. So I had the whole gang down on me instantly like a thousand of bricks. They knew I was helpless, and so they came on.

Special meeting of the committee of the North Staffords.h.i.+re Law Society, if you please! Rumours of prosecution--oh yes! I don't know what!... All because I wouldn't take the trouble to pa.s.s their wretched exams....

Why, I could pa.s.s their exams on my head, if I hadn't anything better to do. But I have. At first I thought I'd retire for five years and pa.s.s their exams, and then come back and make 'em sit up. And wouldn't I have made 'em sit up! But then I said to myself, 'No. It isn't good enough.'"

Hilda frowned. "What isn't?"

"What? The Five Towns isn't good enough! I can find something better than the law, and I can find something better than the Five Towns!...

And here young Lawton has the impudence to begin to preach to me on Knype platform, and to tell me I'm wise in going! He's the President of the local Law Society, you know! No end of a President! And hasn't even got gumption enough to keep his father's practice together! Stupid a.s.s!

Well, I let him have it, and straight! He's no worse than the rest.

They've got no brains in this district. And they're so narrow--narrow isn't the word! Thick-headed's the word. Stupid! Mean!... Mean!... What did it matter to them? I kept to all their rules. There was a real solicitor on the premises, and there'd soon have been another, if I'd had time. No concern of theirs how the money was divided between me and the real solicitor. But they were jealous--there you are! They don't understand enterprise. They hate it. Nothing ever moves in the Five Towns. And they've got no manners--I do believe that's the worst. Look at Lawton's manners! Nothing but a boor! They aren't civilized yet--that's what's the matter with them! That's what my father used to say. Barbarians, he used to say. '_Ce sont des barbares!_'... Kids used to throw stones at him because of his neck-tie. The grown-ups chuck a brick at anything they don't quite fancy. That's their idea of wit."

Hilda was afraid of his tempestuous mood. But she enjoyed her fear, as she might have enjoyed exposure to a dangerous storm. She enjoyed the sensation of her fragility and helplessness there, cooped up with him in the close intimacy of the compartment. She was glad that he did not apologize to her for his lack of restraint, nor foolishly pretend that he was boring her.

"It does seem a shame!" she murmured, her eyes candidly admitting that she felt enormously flattered.

He sighed and laughed. "How often have I heard my father say that--'_Ce sont des barbares_!' Peels only brought him over because they could find n.o.body in the Five Towns civilized enough to do the work that he did....

I can imagine how he must have felt when he first came here!... My G.o.d!... Environment!... I tell you what--it's only lately I've realized how I loathe the provinces!"

The little interior in which they were, swept steadily and smoothly across the central sunlit plain of England, pa.s.sing ca.n.a.ls and brooks and cottages and churches--silent and stolid in that English stupidity that he was criticizing. And Hilda saw of George Cannon all that was French in him. She saw him quite anew, as something rather exotic and entirely marvellous. She thought: "When I first met him, I said to myself he was a most extraordinary man. And I was right. I was more right than I ever imagined. No one down there has any idea of what he really is. They're too stupid, as he says."

He imposed on her his scorn of the provincial. She had to share it. She had a vision of the Five Towns as a smoky blotch on the remote horizon,--negligible, cra.s.s, ridiculous in its heavy self-complacency.

The very Orgreaves themselves were tinged with this odious English provincialism.

He smiled to himself, and then said, very quietly: "It isn't of the least importance, you know. In fact I'm rather glad. I've never had any difficulty in making money, and when I've settled up everything down there I shan't be precisely without. And I shall have no excuse for not branching out in a new line."

She meekly encouraged him to continue.

"Oh yes!" he went on. "The law isn't the only thing--not by a long way.

And besides, I'm sick of it. Do you know what the great thing of the future is, I mean the really great thing--the smas.h.i.+ng big thing?" He smiled, kindly and confidential.

She too smiled, shaking her head.

"Well, I'll tell you. Hotels!"

"Hotels?" She was perfectly nonplussed.

"Hotels! There'll be more money and more fun to be got out of hotels, soon, than out of any other kind of enterprise in the world. You should see those hotels that are going up in London! They'd give you a start, and no mistake! Yes, hotels! There aren't twenty people in England who know what a hotel is! But I know!" He paused, and added reflectively, in a comically nave tone: "Curious how these things come to you, bit by bit! Now, if it hadn't been for Sarah--and that boarding-house--"

He was using his straw hat as a fan. With an unexpected and almost childlike gesture he suddenly threw the hat up on to the rack above his head, "How's that?"

"What a boy he is, after all!" thought Hilda sympathetically, wondering why in the midst of all her manifold astonishment she felt so light-hearted and gay.

"Funny parcel you've got up there!" he idly observed, glancing from one rack to the other.

The parcel contained Mrs. Orgreave's generous conception of a repast proper to be eaten in a train in place of high tea. He helped her to eat it.

As the train approached London he resumed his manhood. And he was impeccably adult as he conducted her from Euston to King's Cross, and put her into a train in a corner of the station that the summer twilight had already taken possession of.

III

Late at night Hilda sat with Sarah Gailey in the landlady's small bedroom at the Cedars. It was lighted by a lamp, because the builder of the house, hating excess, had thought fit not to carry gas-pipes higher than the first floor. A large but old bedstead filled half the floor s.p.a.ce. On the shabby dressing-table a pile of bills and various papers lay near the lamp. Clothes were hung behind the door, and a vague wisp of muslin moved slightly in the warm draught from the tiny open window.

There were two small cane-chairs, enamelled, on which the women sat, close to each other, both incommoded by the unwholesome sultriness of the only chamber that could be spared for the private use of the house-mistress. This small bedroom was Sarah Gailey's home; its amenities were the ultimate nightly reward of her labours. If George Cannon had obtained possession of the Cedars as an occupation for Sarah, this room and Sarah's pleasure therein were the sole justification of the entire mansion.

As Hilda looked at Sarah Gailey's bowed head, but little greyed, beneath the ray of the lamp, and at her shrivelled, neurotic, plaintive face in shadow, and at her knotty hands loosely clasped, she contrasted her companion and the scene with the youthfulness and the s.p.a.ciousness and the st.u.r.dy gay vigour of existence in the household of the Orgreaves.

She thought, with a renewed sense of the mysterious strangeness of life: "Last night I was there, far away--all those scores of miles of fields and towns are between!--and to-night I am here. Down there I was nothing but an idler. Here I am the strongest. I am indispensable. I am the one person on whom she depends. Without me everything will go to pieces."

And she thought of George Cannon's vast enigmatic projects concerning grand hotels. In pa.s.sing the immense pile of St. Pancras on the way from Euston to King's Cross, George Cannon had waved his hand and said: "Look at that! Look at that! It's something after that style that I want for a toy! And I'll have it!" Yes, the lofty turrets of St. Pancras had not intimidated him. He, fresh from little Turnhill and from defeats, could rise at once to the height of them, and by the force of imagination make them his own! He could turn abruptly from the law--to hotels! A disconcerting man! And the mere tone in which he mentioned his enterprise seemed, in a most surprising way, to dignify hotels, and even boarding-houses; to give romance to the perfectly unromantic business of lodging and catering!... And the seed from which he was to grow the magic plant sat in the room there with Hilda: that bowed head! The ambition and the dream resembled St. Pancras: the present reality was the Cedars, and Sarah's poor, stuffy little bedroom in the Cedars.

Sarah began to cry, weakly.

"But what's the matter?" asked Hilda, the strong succourer.

"Nothing. Only it's such a relief to me you've come."

Hilda deprecated lightly. "I should have come sooner if I'd known. You ought to have sent word before."

"No, I couldn't. After all, what is it? I'm only silly. There's nothing really the matter. The minute you come I can see that. I can even stand those Boutwoods if you're here. You know George made it up with them; and I won't say he wasn't right. But I had to put my pride in my pocket.

And yesterday it nearly made me scream out to see Mrs. Boutwood stir her tea."