"Not quite," he said. "But I knew at once. I could see which of them it must be."

The subject at last opened between them, Hilda felt an extraordinary solace and relief. He stood by the bedside, in black, with a great breastplate of white, his hair rough, his hands in his pockets. She thought he had a fine face; she thought of him as, at such a time, her superior; she wanted powerfully to adopt his att.i.tude, to believe in everything he said. They were talking together in safety, quietly, gravely, amicably, withdrawn and safe in the strange house--he benevolent and a.s.suaging and comprehending, she desiring the balm which he could give. It seemed to her that they had never talked to each other in such tones.

"Isn't it awful--awful?" she exclaimed.

"It is," said Edwin, and added carefully, tenderly: "I suppose he _is_ innocent."

She might have flown at him: "That's just like you--to a.s.sume he isn't!"

But she replied:

"I'm quite sure of it. I say--I want you to read all the letters I've had from Mrs. Cannon. I've got them here. They're in my bag there.

Read them now. Of course I always meant to show them to you."

"All right," he agreed, drew a chair to the dressing-table where the bag was, found the letters, and read them. She waited, as he read one letter, put it down, read another, laid it precisely upon the first one, with his terrible exact.i.tude and orderliness, and so on through the whole packet.

"Yes," said he at the end, "I should say he's innocent this time, right enough."

"But something ought to be done!" she cried. "Don't you think something ought to be done, Edwin?"

"Something has been done. Something is being done."

"But something else!"

He got up and walked about the room.

"There's only one thing to be done," he said.

He came towards her, and stood over her again, and the candle on the night-table lighted his chin and the s.p.a.ce between his eyelashes and his eyebrows. He timidly touched her hair, caressing it. They were absolutely at their ease together in the intimacy of the bedroom. In her brief relations with George Cannon there had not been time to establish anything like such intimacy. With George Cannon she had always had the tremors of the fawn.

"What is it?"

"Wait. That's all. It's not the slightest use trying to hurry these public departments. You can't do it. You only get annoyed for nothing at all. You can take that from me, my child."

He spoke with such delicate persuasiveness, such an evident desire to be helpful, that Hilda was convinced and grew resigned. It did not occur to her that he had made a tremendous resolve which had raised him above the Edwin she knew. She thought she had hitherto misjudged and underrated him.

"I wanted to explain to you about that ten pounds," she said.

"That's all right--that's all right," said he hastily.

"But I _must_ tell you. You saw Mrs. Cannon's letter asking me for money. Well, I borrowed the ten pounds from Janet. So of course I had to pay it back, hadn't I?"

"How is Janet?" he asked in a new, lighter tone.

"She seems to be going on splendidly, don't you think so?"

"Well then, we'll go home to-morrow."

"Shall we?"

She lifted her arms and he bent. She was crying. In a moment she was sobbing. She gave him violent kisses amid her sobs, and held him close to her until the fit pa.s.sed. Then she said, in her voice reduced to that of a child:

"What time's the train?"

CHAPTER XVI

THE GHOST

I

It was six-thirty. The autumn dusk had already begun to fade; and in the damp air, cold, grimy, and vaporous, men with scarves round their necks and girls with shawls over their heads, or hatted and even gloved, were going home from work past the petty shops where sweets, tobacco, fried fish, chitterlings, groceries, and novelettes were sold among enamelled advertis.e.m.e.nts of magic soaps. In the feeble and patchy illumination of the footpaths, which left the middle of the streets and the upper air all obscure, the chilled, preoccupied people pa.s.sed each other rapidly like phantoms, emerging out of one mystery and disappearing into another. Everywhere, behind the fanlights and shaded windows of cottages, domesticity was preparing the warm relaxations of the night. Amid the streets of little buildings the lithographic establishment, with a yellow oblong here and there illuminated in its dark facades, stood up high, larger than reality, more important and tyrannic, one of the barracks, one of the prisons, one of the money-works where a single man or a small group of men by brains and vigour and rigour exploited the populace.

Edwin, sitting late in his private office behind those facades, was not unaware of the sensation of being an exploiter. By his side on the large flat desk lay a copy of the afternoon's _Signal_ containing an account of the breaking up by police of an open-air meeting of confessed anarchists on the previous day at Manchester. Manchester was, and is still, physically and morally, very close to the Five Towns, which respect it more than they respect London. An anarchist meeting at Manchester was indeed an uncomfortable portent for the Five Towns.

Enormous strikes, like civil wars at stalemate, characterised the autumn as they had characterised the spring, affecting directly or indirectly every industry, and weakening the prestige of government, conventions, wealth, and success. Edwin was successful. It was because he was successful that he was staying late and that a clerk in the outer office was staying late and that windows were illuminated here and there in the facades. Holding in his hand the wage-book, he glanced down the long column of names and amounts. Some names conveyed nothing to him; but most of them raised definite images in his mind--of big men, roughs, decent clerks with wristbands, undersized pale machinists, intensely respectable skilled artisans and daughtsmen, thin ragged lads, greasy, slatternly, pale girls, and one or two fat women,--all dirty, and working with indifference in dirt. Most of them kowtowed to him; some did not; some scowled askance. But they were all dependent on him. Not one of them but would be prodigiously alarmed and inconvenienced--to say nothing of going hungry--if it he did not pay wages the next morning.

The fact was he could distribute ruin with a gesture and n.o.body could bring him to book....

Something wrong! Under the influence of strikes and anarchist meetings he felt with foreboding and even with a little personal alarm that something was wrong. Those greasy, slatternly girls, for instance, with their coa.r.s.e charm and their s.e.xuality,--they were underpaid. They received as much as other girls, on pot-banks, perhaps more, but they were underpaid. What chance had they? He was getting richer every day, and safer (except for the vague menace); yet he could not appreciably improve their lot, partly for business reasons, partly because any attempt to do so would bring the community about his ears and he would be labelled as a doctrinaire and a fool, and partly because his own commonsense was against such a move. Not those girls, not his works, not this industry and that, was wrong. All was wrong. And it was impossible to imagine any future period when all would not be wrong.

Perfection was a desolating thought. Nevertheless the struggle towards it was instinctive and had to go on. The danger was (in Edwin's eyes) of letting that particular struggle monopolise one's energy. Well, he would not let it. He did a little here and a little there, and he voted democratically and in his heart was most destructively sarcastic about toryism; and for the rest he relished the adventure of existence, and took the best he conscientiously could, and thought pretty well of himself as a lover of his fellowmen. If he was born to be a master, he would be one, and not spend his days in trying to overthrow mastery. He was tired that evening, he had a slight headache, he certainly had worries; but he was not unhappy on the throbbing, tossing steamer of humanity. n.o.body could seem less adventurous than he seemed, with his timidities and his love of moderation, comfort, regularity and security.

Yet his nostrils would sniff to the supreme and all-embracing adventure.

He heard Hilda's clear voice in the outer office: "Mr. Clayhanger in there?" and the clerk's somewhat nervously agitated reply, repeating several times in eager affirmative. And he himself, the master, though still all alone in the sanctum, at once pretended to be very busy.

Her presence would thus often produce an excitation in the organism of the business. She was so foreign to it, so unsoiled by it, so aloof from it, so much more gracious, civilised, enigmatic than anything that the business could show! And, fundamentally, she was the cause of the business; it was all for her; it existed with its dirt, noise, crudity, strain, and eternal effort so that she might exist in her elegance, her disturbing femininity, her restricted and deep affections, her irrational capriciousness, and her strange, brusque commonsense. The clerks and some of the women felt this; Big James certainly felt it; and Edwin felt it, and denied it to himself, more than anybody. There was no economic justice in the arrangement. She would come in veiled, her face mysterious behind the veil, and after a few minutes she would delicately lift her gloved fingers to the veil, and raise it, and her dark, pale, vivacious face would be disclosed. "Here I am!" And the balance was even, her debt paid! That was how it was.

In the month that had pa.s.sed since the visit to Dartmoor, Edwin, despite his resolve to live heroically and philosophically, had sometimes been forced into the secret att.i.tude: "This woman will kill me, but without her I shouldn't be interested enough to live." He was sometimes morally above her to the point of priggishness, and sometimes incredibly below her; but for the most part living in a different dimension. She had heard nothing further from Mrs. Cannon; she knew nothing of the bigamist's fate, though more than once she had written for news. Her moods were unpredictable and disconcerting, and as her moods const.i.tuted the chief object of Edwin's study the effect on him was not tranquillising. At the start he had risen to the difficulty of the situation; but he could not permanently remain at that height, and the situation had apparently become stationary. His exasperations, both concealed and open, were not merely unworthy of a philosopher, they were unworthy of a common man. "Why be annoyed?" he would say to himself.

But he was annoyed. "The tone--the right tone!" he would remind himself. Surely he could remember to command his voice to the right tone? But no! He could not. He could infallibly remember to wind up his watch, but he could not remember that. Moreover, he felt, as he had felt before, on occasions, that no amount of right tone would keep their relations smooth, for the reason that principles were opposed. Could she not see? ... Well, she could not. There she was, entire, unalterable--impossible to chip inconvenient pieces off her--you must take her or leave her; and she could not see, or she would not--which in practice was the same thing.

And yet some of the most exquisite moments of their union had occurred during that feverish and unquiet month--moments of absolute surrender and devotion on her part, of protective love on his; and also long moments of peace. With the early commencement of autumn, all the family had resumed the pursuit of letters with a certain ardour. A startling feminist writer, and the writer whose parentage and whose very name lay in the Five Towns, who had re-created the East and whose vogue was a pa.s.sion among the lettered--both these had published books whose success was extreme and genuine. And in the curtained gas-lit drawing-room of a night Hilda would sit rejoicing over the triumphant satire of the woman-novelist, and Edwin and George would lounge in impossible postures, each mesmerised by a story of the Anglo-Indian; and between chapters Edwin might rouse himself from the enchantment sufficiently to reflect: "How indescribably agreeable these evenings are!" And ten to one he would say aloud, with false severity: "George! Bed!" And George, a fine judge of genuineness in severity, would murmur carelessly: "All right! I'm going!" And not go.

And now Edwin in the office thought:

"She's come to fetch me away."

He was gratified. But he must not seem to be gratified. The sanct.i.ty of business from invasion had to be upheld. He frowned, feigning more diligently than ever to be occupied. She came in, with that air at once apologetic and defiant that wives have in affronting the sacred fastness. n.o.body could have guessed that she had ever been a business woman, arriving regularly at just such an office every morning, shorthand-writing, twisting a copying-press, filing, making appointments. n.o.body could have guessed that she had ever been in business for herself, and had known how sixpence was added to sixpence and a week's profit lost in an hour. All such knowledge had apparently dropped from her like an excrescence, had vanished like a temporary disfigurement, and she looked upon commerce with the uncomprehending, careless, and yet impressed eyes of a young girl.

"h.e.l.lo, missis!" he exclaimed casually.

Then George came in. Since the visit to Dartmoor Hilda had much increased her intimacy with George, spending a lot of time with him, walking with him, and exploring in a sisterly and rea.s.suring manner his most private life. George liked it, but it occasionally irked him and he would give a hint to Edwin that mother needed to be handled at times.

"You needn't come in here, George," said Hilda.

"Well, can I go into the engine-house?" George suggested. Edwin had always expected that he would prefer the machine-room. But the engine-house was his haunt, probably because it was dirty, fiery, and stuffy.

"No, you can't," said Edwin. "Pratt's gone by this, and it's shut up."