Helen with the High Hand Part 3

And if I lose I'll pay."

She made a slight movement, and he noticed for the first time that she was carrying a small purse as black as her glove.

He hesitated, and then he proved what a wise and experienced man he was.

"No," he said, "I'll none bet ye, la.s.s."

He had struck his flag.

It is painful to be compelled to reinforce the old masculine statement that women have no sense of honour. But have they? Helen clearly saw that he had hauled down his flag. Yet did she cease firing? Not a bit.

She gave him a shattering broadside, well knowing that he had surrendered. Her disregard of the ethics of warfare was deplorable.

"Two pounds and one half-penny--to the nearest farthing," said she, a faint blush crimsoning her cheek.

Mr. Ollerenshaw glanced round at the bowling-green, where the captain in vain tried to catch his eye, and then at the groups of children playing on the lower terraces.

"I make no doubt ye can play the piano?" he remarked, when he had recovered.

"Certainly," she replied. "Not that we have to teach the piano. No! But it's understood, all the same, that one or another of us can play marches for the children to walk and drill to. In fact," she added, "for something less than thirty s.h.i.+llings a week we do pretty nearly everything, except build the schools. And soon they'll be expecting us to build the new schools in our spare time." She spoke bitterly, as a native of the Congo Free State might refer to the late King of the Belgians.

"Thirty s.h.i.+llings a _wik_!" said James, acting with fine histrionic skill. "I thought as you said seventy-two pounds a month!"

"Oh no, you didn't!" she protested, firmly. "So don't try to tease me. I never joke about money. Money's a very serious thing."

("Her's a chip o' th' owd block," he told himself, delighted. When he explained matters to himself, and when he grew angry, he always employed the Five Towns dialect in its purest form.)

"You must be same as them hospital nurses," he said, aloud. "You do it because ye like it--for love on it, as they say."

"Like it! I hate it. I hate any sort of work. What fun do you suppose there is in teaching endless stupid children, and stuffing in cla.s.srooms all day, and correcting exercises and preparing sewing all night? Of course, they can't help being stupid. It's that that's so amazing. You can't help being kind to them--they're so stupid."

"If ye didn't do that, what should ye do?" James inquired.

"I shouldn't do anything unless I was forced," said she. "I don't want to do anything, except enjoy myself--read, play the piano, pay visits, and have plenty of _really_ nice clothes. Why should I want to do anything? I can tell you this--if I didn't need the money I'd never go inside that school again, or any other!"

She was heated.

"Dun ye mean to say," he asked, with an ineffable intonation, "that Susan and that there young farmer have gone gadding off to Canada and left you all alone with nothing?"

"Of course they haven't," said Helen. "Why, mother is the most generous old thing you can possibly imagine. She's left all her own income to me."

"How much?"

"Well, it comes to rather over thirty s.h.i.+llings a week."

"And can't a single woman live on thirty s.h.i.+llings a _wik_? Bless us! I don't spend thirty s.h.i.+llings a wik myself."

Helen raised her chin. "A single woman can live on thirty s.h.i.+llings a week," she said. "But what about her frocks?"

"Well, what about her frocks?" he repeated.

"Well," she said, "I like frocks. It just happens that I can't do without frocks. It's just frocks that I work for; I spend nearly all I earn on them." And her eyes, descending, seemed to say: "Look at the present example."

"Seventy pounds a year on ye clothes! Ye're not serious, la.s.s?"

She looked at him coldly. "I am serious," she said.

Experienced as he was, he had never come across a fact so incredible as this fact. And the compulsion of believing it occupied his forces to such an extent that he had no force left to be wise. He did not observe the icy, darting challenge in her eye, and he ignored the danger in her voice.

"All as I can say is you ought to be ashamed o' yourself, la.s.s!" he said, sharply. The reflection was blown out of him by the expansion of his feelings. Seventy pounds a year on clothes!... He too was serious.

Now, James Ollerenshaw was not the first person whom Helen's pa.s.sion for clothes had driven into indiscretions. Her mother, for example, had done battle with that pa.s.sion, and had been defeated with heavy loss. A head-mistress and a chairman of a School Board (a pompous coward) had also suffered severely. And though Helen had been the victor, she had not won without some injury to her nerves. Her campaigns and conquests had left her, on this matter, "touchy"--as the word is used in the Five Towns.

"I shall be very much obliged if you will not speak to me in that tone,"

said she. "Because I cannot permit it either from you or any other man.

When I venture to criticise your private life I shall expect you to criticise mine--and not before. I don't want to be rude, but I hope you understand, great-stepuncle."

The milk was within the twentieth of an inch of the brim. James Ollerenshaw blushed as red as Helen herself had blushed at the beginning of their acquaintance. A girl, the daughter of the chit Susan, to address him so! She had the incomparable insolence of her mother.

Yes, thirty years ago Susan had been just as rude to him. But he was thirty years younger then; he was not a sage of sixty then. He continued to blush. He was raging. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to a.s.sert that his health was momentarily in peril. He glanced for an instant at Helen, and saw that her nostrils were twitching. Then he looked hurriedly away, and rose. The captain of the bowling club excusably a.s.sumed that James was at length going to attack the serious business of the day.

"Now, Mr. Ollerenshaw!" the captain called out; and his tone implied, gently: "Don't you think you've kept me waiting long enough? Women are women; but a bowling-match is a bowling-match."

James turned his back on the captain, moved off, and then--how can one explain it? He realised that in the last six words of Helen's speech there had been a note, a hint, a mere nothing, of softness, of regret for pain caused. He realised, further, the great universal natural law that under any circ.u.mstances--no matter what they may be--when any man--no matter who he may be--differs from any pretty and well-dressed woman--no matter who she may be--he is in the wrong. He saw that it was useless for serious, logical, high-minded persons to inveigh against the absurdity of this law, and to call it bad names. The law of gravity is absurd and indefensible when you fall downstairs; but you obey it.

He returned to Helen, who bravely met his eyes. "I'm off home," he said, hoa.r.s.ely. "It's my tea-time."

"Good-afternoon," she replied, with amiability.

"Happen you'll come along with me, like?"

The use of that word "like" at the end of an interrogative sentence, in the Five Towns, is a subject upon which a book ought to be written; but not this history. The essential point to observe is that Helen got up from the bench and said, with adorable sweetness:

"Why, I shall be charmed to come!"

("What a perfect old darling he is!" she said to herself.)

CHAPTER V

A SALUTATION

As they walked down Moorthorne-road towards the town they certainly made a couple piquant enough, by reason of the excessive violence of the contrast between them, to amuse the eye of the beholder. A young and pretty woman who spends seventy pounds a year on her ornamentations, walking by the side of a little old man (she had the better of him by an inch) who had probably not spent seventy pounds on clothes in sixty years--such a spectacle must have drawn attention even in the least attentive of towns. And Bursley is far from the least attentive of towns. James and his great-stepniece had not got as far as the new Independent Chapel when it was known in St. Luke's-square, a long way farther on, that they were together; a tramcar had flown forward with the interesting fact. From that moment, of course, the news, which really was great news, spread itself over the town with the rapidity of a perfume; no corner could escape it. All James's innumerable tenants seemed to sniff it simultaneously. And that evening in the mouth of the entire town (I am licensing myself to a little poetical exaggeration) there was no word but the word "Jimmy."

Their converse, as they descended into the town, was not effective. It was, indeed, feeble. They had fought a brief but bitter duel, and James Ollerenshaw had been severely wounded. His dignity bled freely; he made, strange to say, scarcely any attempt to staunch the blood, which might have continued to flow for a considerable time had not a diversion occurred. (It is well known that the dignity will only bleed while you watch it. Avert your eyes, and it instantly dries up.) The diversion, apparently of a trifling character, had, in truth, an enormous importance, though the parties concerned did not perceive this till later. It consisted in the pa.s.sing of Mrs. Prockter and her stepson, Emanuel Prockter, up Duck Bank as James and Helen were pa.s.sing down Duck Bank.

Mrs. Prockter (who by reason of the rare "k" in her name regarded herself as the sole genuine in a district full of Proctors) may be described as the dowager of Bursley, the custodian of its respectability, and the summit of its social ladder. You could not climb higher than Mrs. Prockter. She lived at Hillport, and even in that haughty suburb there was none who dared palter with an invitation from Mrs. Prockter. She was stout and deliberate. She had waving flowers in her bonnet and pictures of flowers on her silken gown, and a grey mantle. Much of her figure preceded her as she walked. Her stepson had a tenor voice and a good tailor; his age was thirty.