HILDA LESSWAYS. Arnold Bennett
The slim child was pretty, with graceful and eager movements, and certainly a rapid comprehension. Her grey eyes sparkled, and her brown hair was coquettishly tied up, rather in the manner of a horse’s tail on May Day. She had arrived all by herself in the morning, with a tiny bundle, and she made a remarkably neat appearance—if you did not look at her boots, which had evidently been somebody else’s a long time before. Hilda had been clearly aware of a feeling of pleasure at the prospect of this young girl’s presence in the house.
Hilda now saw her in another aspect. She wore a large foul apron of sacking, which made her elegant body quite shapeless, and she was kneeling on the red-and-black tiled floor of the kitchen, with her enormous cracked boots sticking out behind her. At one side of her was a pail full of steaming brown water, and in her red coarse little hands, which did not seem to belong to those gracile arms, she held a dripping clout. In front of her, on a half-dried space of clean, shining floor, stood Mrs. Lessways, her head wrapped in a flannel petticoat. Nearer to the child stretched a small semi-circle of liquid mud; to the rear was the untouched dirty floor. Florrie was looking up at her mistress with respectful, strained attention. She could not proceed with her work because Mrs. Lessways had chosen this moment to instruct her, with much snuffling, in the duties and responsibilities of her position.
“Yes, mum,” Florrie whispered. She seemed to be incapable of speaking beyond a whisper. But the whisper was delicate and agreeable; and perhaps it was a mysterious sign of her alleged unusual physical strength.
“You’ll have to be down at half-past six. Then you’ll light your kitchen fire, but of course you’ll get your coal up first. And then you’ll do your boots. Now the bacon—but never mind that—either Miss Hilda or me will be down tomorrow morning to show you.”
“Yes, mum,” Florrie’s whisper was grateful.
“When you’ve got things going a bit like, you’ll do your parlour—I’ve told you all about that, though. But I didn’t tell you—except on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays you give your parlour a thorough turn-out after breakfast, and mind it’s got to be all straight for dinner at half-past twelve.”
“Yes, mum.”
“I shall show you about your fire-irons—” Mrs. Lessways was continuing to make everything in the house the private property of Florrie, when Hilda interrupted her about the handkerchief, and afterwards with an exhortation to beware of the dampness of the floor, which exhortation Mrs. Lessways faintly resented; whereupon Hilda left the kitchen; it was always imprudent to come between Mrs. Lessways and a new servant.
Hilda remained listening in the lobby to the interminable and rambling instruction. At length Mrs. Lessways said benevolently:
“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t go to bed at half-past eight, or nine at the latest. No reason whatever. And if you’re quick and handy —and I’m sure you are—you’ll have plenty of time in the afternoon for plain sewing and darning. I shall see how you can darn,” Mrs. Lessways added encouragingly.
“Yes, mum.”
Hilda’s heart revolted, less against her mother’s defects as an organizer than against the odious mess of the whole business of domesticity. She knew that, with her mother in the house, Florrie would never get to bed at half-past eight and very seldom at nine, and that she would never be free in the afternoons. She knew that if her mother would only consent to sit still and not interfere, the housework could be accomplished with half the labour that at present went to it. There were three women in the place, or at any rate, a woman, a young woman, and a girl—and in theory the main preoccupation of all of them was this business of domesticity. It was, of course, ridiculous, and she would never be able to make anyone see that it was ridiculous. But that was not all. The very business itself absolutely disgusted her. It disgusted her to such a point that she would have preferred to do it with her own hands in secret rather than see others do it openly in all its squalor. The business might be more efficiently organized—for example, there was no reason why the sitting-room should be made uninhabitable between breakfast and dinner once a week—but it could never be other than odious. The kitchen floor must inevitably be washed every day by a girl on her knees in sackcloth with terrible hands. She was witnessing now the first stage in the progress of a victim of the business of domesticity. To-day Florrie was a charming young creature, full of slender grace. Soon she would be a dehumanized drudge. And Hilda could not stop it! All over the town, in every street of the town, behind all the nice curtains and blinds, the same hidden shame was being enacted: a vast, sloppy, steaming, greasy, social horror—inevitable! It amounted to barbarism, Hilda thought in her revolt. She turned from it with loathing. And yet nobody else seemed to turn from it with loathing. Nobody else seemed to perceive that this business of domesticity was not life itself, was at best the clumsy external machinery of life. On the contrary, about half the adult population worshipped it as an exercise sacred and paramount, enlarging its importance and with positive gusto permitting it to monopolize their existence. Nine-tenths of her mother’s conversation was concerned with the business of domesticity—and withal Mrs. Lessways took the business more lightly than most!
iii
There was an impatient knock at the front door,—rare phenomenon, but not unknown.
Mrs. Lessways cried out thickly from the folds of her flannel petticoat:
“Hilda, just see who that is, will you?... knocking like that! Florrie can’t come.”
And just as Hilda reached the front door, her mother opened the kitchen door wide, to view the troublesome disturber and to inform him, if as was probable he was exceeding his rights, that he would have done better to try the back door.
It was Mr. Cannon at the front door.
Hilda heard the kitchen door slammed to behind her, but the noise was like a hallucination in her brain. She was staggered by the apparition of Mr. Cannon in the porch. She had vaguely wondered what he might do to execute his promise of aid; she had felt that time was running short if her mother was to be prevented from commencing rent-collector on the Monday; she had perhaps ingenuously expected from him some kind of miracle; but of a surety she had never dreamed that he would call in person at her home. “He must be mad!” she would have exclaimed to herself, if the grandeur of his image in her heart had not made any such accusation impossible to her. He was not mad; he was merely inscrutable, terrifyingly so. It was as if her adventurous audacity, personified, had doubled back on her, and was exquisitely threatening her.
“Good afternoon!” said Mr. Cannon, smiling confidently and yet with ceremoniousness. “Is your mother about?”
“Yes.” Hilda did not know it, but she was whispering quite in the manner of Florrie.
“Shall I come in?”
“Oh! Please do!” The words jumped out of her mouth all at once, so anxious was she to destroy any impression conceivably made that she did not desire him to come in.
He crossed the step and took her hand with one gesture. She shut the door. He waited in suave silence. There was barely space for them together in the narrow lobby, and she scarce dared look up at him. He easily dominated her. His bigness subdued her, and the handsomeness of his face and his attire was like a moral intimidation. He had a large physical splendour that was well set off and illustrated by the brilliance of his linen and his broadcloth. She was as modest as a mouse beside him. The superior young woman, the stern and yet indulgent philosopher, had utterly vanished, and only a poor little mouse remained.
“Will you please come into the drawing-room?” she murmured when, after an immense effort to keep full control of her faculties, she had decided where he must be put.
“Thanks,” he said.
As she diminished herself, with beautiful shy curves of her body, against the wall so that he could manoeuvre his bigness through the drawing-room doorway, he gave her a glance half benign and half politely malicious, which seemed to say again: “I know you’re afraid, and I rather like it. But you know you