The Clayhanger Trilogy: Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways & These Twain (Complete Edition). Bennett Arnold
down from the stone floor of the porch to the garden. He felt rain. And he noticed that the sky was very much darker.
“By Jove!” he said. “It’s beginning to rain, I do believe.”
“I thought it would,” she answered.
A squall of wind suddenly surged rustling through the high trees in the garden of the Orgreaves, and the next instant threw a handful of wild raindrops on his cheek.
“You’d better stand against the other wall,” he suggested. “You’ll catch it there, if it keeps on.”
She obeyed. He returned to the porch, but remained in the exposed portion of it.
“Better come here,” she said, indicating somehow her side.
“Oh! I’m all right.”
“You needn’t be afraid of me,” she snapped.
He grinned awkwardly, but said nothing, for he could not express his secret resentment. He considered the girl to be of exceedingly unpleasant manners.
“Would you mind telling me the time?” she asked.
He took out his watch, but peer as he might, he could not discern the position of the hands.
“Half a second,” he said, and struck a match. The match was blown out before he could look at the dial, but by its momentary flash he saw Hilda, pressed against the wall. Her lips were tight, her eyes blazing, her hands clenched. She frowned; she was pale, and especially pale by contrast with the black of her plain austere dress.
“If you’ll come into the house,” he said, “I can get a light there.” The door was ajar.
“No thanks,” she declined. “It doesn’t really matter what time it is, does it? Good night!”
He divined that she was offering her hand. He clasped it blindly in the dark. He could not refuse to shake hands. Her hand gave his a feverish and lingering squeeze, which was like a contradicting message in the dark night; as though she were sending through her hand a secret denial of her spoken accents and her frown. He forgot to answer her ‘good night.’ A trap rattled furiously up the road. (Yes; only six yards off, on the other side of the boundary wall, was the public road! And he standing hidden there in the porch with this girl whom he had seen for the first time that evening!) It was the mail-cart, rushing to Knype.
She did not move. She had said ‘good night’ and shaken hands; and yet she remained. They stood speechless.
Then without warning, after perhaps a minute that seemed like ten minutes, she walked away, slowly, into the rain. And as she did so, Edwin could just see her straightening her spine and throwing back her shoulders with a proud gesture.
“I say, Miss Lessways!” he called in a low voice. But he had no notion of what he wanted to say. Only her departure had unlocked his throat.
She made no sign. Again he grinned awkwardly, a little ashamed of her and a little ashamed of himself, because neither had behaved as woman or man of the world.
After a short interval he followed in her steps as far as the gap in the hedge, which he did not find easily. There was no sign of her. The gas burned serenely in her bedroom, and the window was open. Then he saw the window close up a little, and an arm in front of the drawn blind. The rain had apparently ceased.
Six.
“Well, that’s an eye-opener, that is!” he murmured, and thereby expressed the situation. “Of all the damned impudence!” He somewhat overstated his feelings, because he was posing a little to himself: an accident that sooner or later happens to every man! “And she’ll go back and make out to Master Tom that she’s just had a stroll in the garden! Garden, indeed! And yet they’re all so fearfully stuck on her.”
He nodded his head several times reflectively, as if saying, “Well, well! What next?” And he murmured aloud: “So that’s how they carry on, is it!” He meant, of course, women... He was very genuinely astounded.
But the chief of all his acute sensations in that moment was pride: sheer pride. He thought, what ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have thought in such circumstances: “She’s taken a fancy to me!” Useless to call him a conceited coxcomb, from disgust that he did not conform to a sentimentally idealistic standard! He thought: “She’s taken a fancy to me!” And he was not a conceited coxcomb. He exulted in the thought. Nothing had ever before so startled and uplifted him. It constituted the supreme experience of his career as a human being. The delightful and stimulating experience of his evening in the house of the Orgreaves sank into unimportance by the side of it. The new avenues towards joy which had been revealed to him appeared now to be quite unexciting paths; he took them for granted. And he forgot the high and serious mood of complex emotion in which he had entered the new house. Music and the exotic flavours of a foreign language seemed a little thing, in comparison with the feverish hand-clasp of the girl whom he so peculiarly disliked. The lifeless hand which he had taken in the drawing-room of the Orgreaves could not be the same hand as that which had closed intimately on his under the porch. She must have two right hands!
And, even more base than his coxcombry, he despised her because it was he, Edwin, to whom she had taken a fancy. He had not sufficient self-confidence to justify her fancy in his own eyes. His argument actually was that no girl worth having could have taken a fancy to him at sight. Thus he condemned her for her faith in him. As for his historic remark about belief,—well, there might or might not be something in that; perhaps there was something in it. One instant he admired it, and the next he judged it glib and superficial. Moreover, he had conceivably absorbed it from a book. But even if it were an original epigrammatic pearl—was that an adequate reason for her following him to an empty house at dead of night? Of course, an overwhelming passion might justify such behaviour! He could recall cases in literature... Yes, he had got so far as to envisage the possibility of overwhelming passion... Then all these speculations disconcertingly vanished, and Hilda presented herself to his mind as a girl intensely religious, who would shrink from no unconventionality in the pursuit of truth. He did not much care for this theory of Hilda, nor did it convince him.
“Imagine marrying a girl like that!” he said to himself disdainfully. And he made a catalogue of her defects of person and of character. She was severe, satiric, merciless. “And I suppose—if I were to put my finger up!” Thus ran on his despicable ideas. “Janet Orgreave, now!” Janet had every quality that he could desire, that he could even think of. Janet was balm.
“You needn’t be afraid,” that unpleasant girl had said. And he had only been able to grin in reply!
Still, pride! Intense masculine pride!
There was one thing he had liked about her: that straightening of the spine and setting back of the shoulders as she left him. She had in her some tinge of the heroic.
He quitted the garden, and as soon as he was in the street he remembered that he had not pulled-to the garden door of the house. “Dash the confounded thing!” he exploded, returning. But he was not really annoyed. He would not have been really annoyed even if he had had to return from half-way down Trafalgar Road. Everything was a trifle save that a girl had run after him under such romantic circumstances. The circumstances were not strictly romantic, but they so seemed to him.
Going home, he did not meet a soul; only in the middle distance of one of the lower side streets he espied a policeman. Trafalgar Road was a solitude of bright and forlorn gas lamps and dark, excluding facades.
Suddenly he came to the corner of Wedgwood Street. He had started from Bleakridge; he had arrived at home: the interval between these two events was a perfect blank, save for the policeman. He could not recall having walked all the way down the road. And as he put the key into the door he was not in the least disturbed by the thought that his father might not have gone to bed. He went upstairs with a certain swaggering clatter, as who should say to all sleepers and bullies: “You be damned! I don’t care for any of you! Something’s happened to me.”