Hilda Lessways by Arnold Bennett (reading fiction txt) 📖

elbows and kissed her, rather clumsily, owing to the gloom, between her nose and her mouth. She did not shrink back, but accepted the embrace quite insensibly. The contact of his moustache and of his lips, and his slight, pleasant masculine odour, produced no effect on her whatever.

"Why are you sitting here? Look here, I've signed the transfer of those Continental shares, and paid the cheque! So it's domino, now!"

Between the engagement and the marriage there had been an opportunity of purchasing three thousand pounds' worth of preference shares in the Brighton Hotel Continental Limited, which hotel was the latest and largest in the King's Road, a vast affair of eight storeys and bathrooms on every floor. The chance of such an investment had fascinated George. It helped his dreams and pointed to the time when he would be manager and part proprietor of a palace like the Continental. Hilda being very willing, he had sold her railways shares and purchased the hotel shares, and he knew that he had done a good thing. Now he possessed an interest in three different establishments, he who had scarcely been in Brighton a year. The rapid progress, he felt, was characteristic of him.

Hilda kept silence, for the sole reason that she could think of no words to say. As for the matter of the investment, it appeared to her to be inexpressibly uninteresting. From under the lashes of lowered eyes she saw his form shadowily in front of her.

"You don't mean to say Sarah's been making herself disagreeable already!" he said. And his tone was affectionate and diplomatic, yet faintly ironical. He had perceived that something unusual had occurred, perhaps something serious, and he was anxious to soothe and to justify his wife. Hilda perfectly understood his mood and intention, and she was reassured.

"Hasn't Sarah told you?" she asked in a harsh, uncontrolled voice, though she knew that he had not seen Sarah.

"No; where is she?" he inquired patiently.

"It's Louisa," Hilda went on, with the sick fright of a child compelled by intimidation to affront a danger. Her mouth was very dry.

"Oh!"

"She lost her temper and made a fearful scene with Sarah, on the stairs; she said the most awful things."

George laughed low, and lightly. He guessed Louisa's gift for foul insolence and invective.

"For instance?" George encouraged. He was divining from Hilda's singular tone that tact would be needed.

"Well, she said you'd got a wife living in Devonshire."

There was a pause.

"And who'd told her that?"

"Florrie."

"_In_deed!" muttered George. Hilda could not decide whether his voice was natural or forced.

Then he stepped across to the door, and opened it.

"What are you going to do to her?" Hilda questioned, as it were despairingly.

He left the room and banged the door.

"It's not true," Hilda was beginning to say to herself, but she seemed to derive no pleasure from the dawning hope of George's innocence.

Then George came into the room again, hesitated, and shut the door carefully.

"I suppose it's no good shilly-shallying about," he said, in such a tone as he might have used had he been vexed and disgusted with Hilda. "I have got a wife living, and she's in Devonshire! I expect she's been inquiring in Turnhill if I'm still in the land of the living. Probably wants to get married again herself."

Hilda glanced at his form, and suddenly it was the form of a stranger, but a stranger who had loved her. And she thought: "Why did I let this stranger love me?" It was scarce believable that she had ever seriously regarded him as a husband. And she found that tears were running down her cheeks; and she felt all her girlishness and fragility. "Didn't I always know," she asked herself with weak resignation, "that it was unreal? What am I to do now?" The catastrophe had indeed happened to her, and she could not deal with it! She did not even feel tragic. She did not feel particularly resentful against George. She had read of such catastrophes in the newspapers, but the reality of experience nonplussed her. "I ought to do something," she reflected. "But what?"

"What's the use of me saying I'm sorry?" he asked savagely. "I acted for the best. The chances were ten thousand to one against me being spotted. But there you are! You never know your luck." He spoke meditatively, in a rather hoarse, indistinct voice. "All owing to Florrie, of course! When it was suggested we should have that girl, I knew there was a danger. But I pooh-poohed it! I said nothing could possibly happen.... And just look at it now!... I wanted to cut myself clear of the Five Towns, absolutely--absolutely! And then like a damnation fool I let Florrie come here! If she hadn't come, that woman might have inquired about me in Turnhill till all was blue, without you hearing about her! But there it is!" He snapped his fingers. "It's my fault for being found out! That's the only thing I'm guilty of.... And look at it! Look at it!"

Hilda could tell from the movements of the vague form in the corner by the door, and by the quality of his voice, that George Cannon was in a state of extreme emotion. She had never known him half so moved. His emotion excited her and flattered her. She thought how wonderful it was that she, the shaking little girl who yesterday had run off with fourpence to buy a meal at a tripe-shop, should be the cause of this emotion in such a man. She thought: "My life is marvellous." She was dizzied by the conception of the capacity of her own body and soul for experience. No factors save her own body and soul and his had been necessary to the bringing about of the situation. It was essential only that the man and the woman should be together, and their companionship would produce miracles of experience! She ceased crying. Astounding that she had never, in George's eyes, suspected his past! It was as if he had swiftly opened a concealed door in the house of their passion and disclosed a vista of which she had not dreamed.

"But surely that must have been a long time ago!" she said in an ordinary tone.

"Considering that I was twenty-two--yes!"

"Why did you leave her?"

"Why did I leave her? Because I had to! I'd gone as a clerk in a solicitor's office in Torquay, and she was a client. She went mad about me. I'm only telling you. She was a spinster. Had one of those big houses high up on the hill behind the town!" He stopped; and then his voice began to come again out of the deep shadow in the corner. "She wanted me, and she got me. And she didn't care who knew! The wedding was in the _Torquay Directory_. I told her I'd got no relations, and she was jolly glad."

"But how old was she? Young?"

George sneered. "She'd never see thirty-six again, the day she was married. Good-looking. Well-dressed. Very stylish and all that! Carried me off my feet. Of course there was the money.... I may as well out with it all while I'm about it! She made me an absolute present of four thousand pounds. Insisted on doing it. I never asked. Of course I know I married for money. It happens to youths sometimes just as it does to girls. It may be disgusting, but not more disgusting for one than for the other. Besides, I didn't realize it was a sale and purchase, at the time!... Oh! And it lasted about ten days. I couldn't stand it, so I told her so and chucked it. She began an action for restitution of conjugal rights, but she soon tired of that. She wouldn't have her four thousand back. Simply wouldn't! She was a terror, but I'll say that for her. Well, I kept it. Four thousand pounds is a lot of brass. That's how I started business in Turnhill, if you want to know!" He spoke defiantly. "You may depend I never let on in the Five Towns about my beautiful marriage.... That's the tale. You've got to remember I was twenty-two!"

She thought of Edwin Clayhanger and Charlie Orgreave as being about twenty-two, and tried in her imagination to endow the mature George Cannon with their youth and their simplicity and their freshness. She was saddened and overawed; not wrathful, not obsessed by a sense of injury.

Then she heard a sob in the corner, and then another. The moment was terrible for her. She could only distinguish in the room the blur of a man's shape against the light-coloured wall-paper, and the whiteness of the counterpane, and the dark square of the window broken by the black silhouette of the mirror. She slipped off the bed, and going in the direction of the dressing-table groped for a match-box and lit the gas. Dazzled by the glare of the gas, she turned to look at the corner where stood George Cannon.


III


The whole aspect of the room was now altered. The window was blacker than anything else; light shone on the carved frame of the mirror and on the vessels of the washstand; the trunks each threw a sharply defined shadow; the bed was half in the shadow of its mahogany foot, and half a glittering white; all the array of requisites on the dressing-table lay stark under the close scrutiny of the gas; and high above the bed, partly on the wall and partly on the ceiling, was a bright oblong reflection from the upturned mirror.

Hilda turned to George with a straightening of the shoulders, as if to say: "It is I who have the courage to light the gas and face the situation!" But when she saw him her challenging pride seemed to die slowly away. Though there was no sign of a tear on his features, and though it was difficult to believe that it was he who had just sobbed, nevertheless, his figure was dismayingly tragic. Every feature was distorted by agitation. He was absorbed in himself, shameless and careless of appearances. He was no more concerned about appearances and manly shame than a sufferer dying in torment. He was beyond all that--in truth a new George Cannon! He left the corner, and sat down on the bed in the hollow made by Hilda, and stared at the wall, his hands in the pockets of his gay suit. His gestures as he moved, and his posture as he sat, made their unconscious appeal to her in their abandonment. He was caught; he was vanquished; he was despairing; but he instinctively, and without any wish to do so, kept his dignity. He was still, in his complete overthrow, the mature man of the world, the man to whom it was impossible to be ridiculous.

Hilda in a curious way grew proud of him. With an extraordinary inconsequence she dwelt upon the fact that, always grand--even as a caterer, he had caused to be printed at the foot of the menu forms which he had instituted, the words: "A second helping of all or any of the above dishes will willingly be served if so desired." And in the general havoc of the shock she began to be proud also of herself, because it was the mysterious power of her individuality that had originated the disaster. The sense of their intimate withdrawn seclusion in the room, disordered and littered by arrival, utterly alone save for the living flame of the gas, the