Читать книгу: «These Twain», страница 30

The list of Hilda's guests, and the names absent from it, gave an indication of the trend of social history. The Benbows were not asked; the relations of the two families remained as friendly as ever they were, but the real breach between them, caused by profound differences of taste and intelligence, was now complete. Maggie would have been asked, had she not refused in advance, from a motive of shyness. In all essential respects Maggie had been annexed by Clara and Albert. She had given up Auntie Hamps's house (of which the furniture had been either appropriated or sold) and gone to live with the Benbows as a working aunt, – this in spite of Albert's default in the matter of interest; she forewent her rights, slept in a small room with Amy, paid a share of the household expenses, and did the work of a nursemaid and servant combined-simply because she was Maggie. She might, had she chosen, have lived in magnificence with the Clayhangers, but she would not face the intellectual and social strain of doing so. Jim Orgreave was not invited; briefly he had become impossible, though he was still well-dressed. More strange-Tom Orgreave and his wife had only been invited after some discussion, and had declined! Tom was growing extraordinarily secretive, solitary, and mysterious. It was reported that Mrs. Tom had neither servant nor nursemaid, and that she dared not ask her husband for money to buy clothes. Yet Edwin and Tom when they met in the street always stopped for a talk, generally about books. Daisy Marrion, who said openly that Tom and Mrs. Tom were a huge disappointment to everybody, was invited and she accepted. Janet Orgreave had arrived in Bursley on a visit to the Clayhangers on the very day of the party. The Cheswardines were asked, mainly on account of Stephen, whose bluff, utterly unintellectual, profound good-nature, and whose adoration of his wife, were gradually endearing him to the perceptive. Mr. and Mrs. Fearns were requested to bring their daughter Annunciata, now almost marriageable, and also Mademoiselle Renée Souchon, the French governess, newly arrived in the district, of the Fearns younger children. Folks hinted their astonishment that Alma Fearns should have been imprudent enough to put so exotic a woman under the same roof with her husband. Ingpen needed no invitation; nothing could occur at the Clayhangers' without him. Doctor Stirling was the other mature bachelor. Finally in the catalogue were four Swetnams, the vigorous and acute Sarah (who was a mere acquaintance), aged twenty-five, Tom Swetnam, and two younger brothers. Tom had to bring with him the prime excuse for the party, – namely, Miss Manna Höst of Copenhagen, to whom Hilda intended to show that the Swetnams were not the only people on earth. There were thus eight women, eight men (who had put on evening dress out of respect for the foreigner), and George.

At eleven o'clock, when the musical part of the entertainment was over, Miss Höst had already fully secured for herself the position which later she was to hold as the wife of Tom Swetnam. Bleakridge had been asked to meet her and inspect her, and the opinion of Bleakridge was soon formed that Copenhagen must be a wondrous and a romantic place and that Tom Swetnam knew his way about. In the earliest years when the tourist agencies first discovered the advertising value of the phrase "Land of the Midnight Sun," Tom the adventurous had made the Scandinavian round trip, and each subsequent Summer he had gone off again in the same direction. The serpents of the Hanbridge and the Bursley Conservative clubs, and of the bar of the Five Towns Hotel, had wagered that there was a woman at the bottom of it. There was. He had met her at Marienlyst, the watering-place near Helsingor (called by the tourist agencies Elsinore). Manna Höst was twenty-three, tall and athletically slim, and more blonde than any girl ever before seen in the Five Towns. She had golden hair and she wore white. It was understood that she spoke Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. She talked French with facility to Renée Souchon. And Tom said that her knowledge of German surpassed her knowledge of either French or English. She spoke English excellently, with a quaint, endearing accent, but with correctness. Sometimes she would use an idiom (picked up from the Swetnam boys), exquisitely unaware that it was not quite suited to the lips of a young woman in a strange drawing-room; her innocence, however, purified it.

She sang classical songs in German, with dramatic force, and she could play accompaniments. She was thoroughly familiar with all the music haltingly performed by Ingpen, Janet, Annunciata, and young George. Ingpen was very seriously interested in her views thereon. She knew about the French authors from whose works Renée Souchon chose her recitations. And standing up at the buffet table in the dining-room, she had fabricated astounding sandwiches in the Danish style. She stated that Danish cooks reckoned ninety-three sorts of sandwiches. She said in her light, eager voice, apropos of cooking: "There is one thing I cannot understand. I cannot understand why you English throw your potatoes to melt in cold water for an hour before you boil them." "Nor I!" interjected Renée Souchon. No other woman standing round the table had ever conceived the propriety of boiling potatoes without first soaking them in cold water, and Manna was requested to explain. "Because," she said, "it-it lets go the salts of potassium which are so necessary for the pheesical deve*lop*ment of the body." Whereupon Tertius Ingpen had been taken by one of his long crescendo laughs, a laugh that ended by his being bent nearly double below the level of the table. Everybody was much impressed, and Ingpen himself not the least. Ingpen wondered what a girl so complex could see in a man like Tom Swetnam, who, although he could talk about the arts, had no real feeling for any of them.

But what impressed the company even more than Miss Höst's accomplishments was the candid fervour of her comprehensive interest in life, which was absolutely without self-consciousness or fear. She talked with the same disarming ingenuous eager directness to hard-faced Charles Fearns, the secret rake; to his wife, the ageing and sweetly-sad mother of a family; to Renée Souchon, who despite her plainness and her rumoured bigotry seemed to attract all the men in the room by something provocative in her eye and the carriage of her hips; to the simple and powerful Stephen Cheswardine; to Vera, the delicious and elegant cat; to Doctor Stirling with his Scotch mysticism, and to Tertius Ingpen the connoisseur and avowed bachelor. She spoke to Hilda, Janet and Daisy Marrion as one member of a secret sisterhood to other members, to Annunciata as a young girl, and to George as an initiated sister. She left them to turn to Edwin with a trustful glance as to one whose special reliability she had divined from the first. "Have a liqueur, Miss Höst," Edwin enjoined her. In a moment she was sipping Chartreuse. "I love it!" she murmured.

But somehow beneath all such freedoms and frankness she did not cease to be a maiden with reserves of mystery. Her assumption that nobody could misinterpret her demeanour was remarkable to the English observers, and far more so to Renée Souchon. All gazed at her piquant blonde face, scarcely pretty, with its ardent restless eyes, and felt the startling compliment of her quick, searching sympathy. And she, tinglingly aware of her success, proved easily equal to the ordeal of it. Only at rare intervals did she give a look at the betrothed, as if for confirmation of her security. As for Tom, he was positively somewhat unnerved by the brilliance of the performance. He left her alone, without guidance, as a ring-master who should stand aside during a turn and say: "See this marvel! I am no longer necessary." When people glanced at him after one of her effects, he would glance modestly away, striving to hide from them his illusion that he himself had created the bewitching girl. At half past eleven, when the entire assemblage passed into the drawing-room, she dropped on to the piano-stool and began a Waldteufel waltz with irresistible seductiveness.

Hilda's heart leaped. In a minute the carpet was up, and the night, which all had supposed to be at an end, began.

At nearly one o'clock in the morning the party was moving strongly by its own acquired momentum and needed neither the invigoration nor the guidance which hosts often are compelled to give. Hilda, having finished a schottische with Dr. Stirling, missed Janet from the drawing-room. Leaving the room in search of her, she saw Edwin with Tom Swetnam and the glowing Manna at the top of the stairs.

"Hello!" she called out. "What are you folks doing?"

Manna's light laugh descended like a shower of crystals.

"Just taking a constitutional," Edwin answered.

Hilda waved to them in passing. She was extremely elated. Among other agreeable incidents was the success of her new black lace frock. Edwin's voice pleased her, – it was so calm, wise, and kind, and at the same time mysteriously ironical. She occasionally admitted, at the sound of that voice when Edwin was in high spirits, that she had never been able to explore completely the more withdrawn arcana of his nature. He had behaved with perfection that evening. She admitted that he was the basis of the evening, that without him she could never have such triumphs. It was strange that a man by spending so many hours per day at a works could create the complicated ease and luxury of a home. She perceived how steadily and surely he had progressed since their marriage, and how his cautiousness always justified itself, and how he had done all that he had said he would do. And she had a vision of that same miraculous creative force of his at work, by her volition, in the near future upon Ladderedge Hall. Her mood became a strange compound of humility before him and of self-confident pride in her own power to influence him.

In the boudoir Janet was reclining in the sole easy chair. Dressed in grey (she had abandoned white), she was as slim as ever, and did not look her age. With face flushed, eyes glinting under drooping lids, and bosom heaving rather quickly, she might have passed in the half-light for a young married woman still under the excitement of matrimony, instead of a virgin of forty.

"I was so done up I had to come and hide myself!" she murmured in a dreamy tone.

"Well, of course you've had the journey to-day and everything…"

"I never did come across such a dancer as Charles Fearns!" Janet went on.

"Yes," said Hilda, standing with her back to the fire, with one hand on the mantelpiece. "He's a great dancer-or at least he makes you think so. But I'm sure he's a bad man."

"Yes, I suppose he is!" Janet agreed with a sigh.

Neither of the women spoke for a moment, and each looked away.

Through the closed door came the muffled sound o£ the piano, played by Annunciata. No melody was distinguishable, – only the percussion of the bass chords beating out the time of a new mazurka. It was as if the whole house faintly but passionately pulsed in the fever of the dance.

"I see you've got a Rossetti," said Janet at last, fingering a blue volume that lay on the desk.

"Edwin gave it me," Hilda replied. "He's gradually giving me all my private poets. But somehow I haven't been able to read much lately. I expect it's the idea of moving into the country that makes me restless."

"But is it settled, all that?"

"Of course it's settled, my dear. I'm determined to take him away-" Hilda spoke of her husband as of a parcel or an intelligent bear on a chain, as loving wives may-"right out of all this. I'm sure it will be a good thing for him. He doesn't mind, really. He's promised me. Only he wants to make sure of either selling or letting this house first. He's always very cautious, Edwin is. He simply hates doing a thing straight off."

"Yes, he is rather that way inclined," said Janet.

"I wanted him to take Ladderedge at once, even if we didn't move into it. Anyhow we couldn't move into it immediately, because of the repairs and things. They'll take a fine time, I know. We can get it for sixty pounds a year. And what's sixty pounds more or less to Edwin? It's no more than what the rent of this house would be. But no, he wouldn't! He must see where he stands with this house before he does anything else! You can't alter him, you know!"

The door was cautiously pushed, and Ingpen entered.

"So you're discussing her!" he said, low, with a satiric grin.

"Discussing who?" Hilda sharply demanded.

"You know."

"Tertius," said Hilda, "you're worse than a woman."

He giggled with delight.

"I suppose you mean that to be very severe."

"If you want to know, we were talking about Ladderedge."

"So apologise!" added Janet, sitting up.

Ingpen's face straightened, and he began to tap his teeth with his thumb.

"Curious! That's just what I came in about. I've been trying to get a chance to tell you all the evening. There's somebody else after Ladderedge, a man from Axe. He's been to look over it twice this week. I thought I'd tip you the wink."

Hilda stood erect, putting her shoulders back.

"Have you told Edwin?" she asked very curtly.

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"He said it was only a dodge of the house-agent's to quicken things up."

"And do you think it is?"

"Well, I doubt it," Ingpen answered apprehensively. "That's why I wanted to warn you-his lordship being what he is."

Voices, including Edwin's, could be heard in the hall.

"Here, I'm not going to be caught conspiring with you!" Ingpen whispered. "It's more than my place is worth." And he departed.

The voices receded, and Hilda noiselessly shut the door. Everything was now changed for her by a tremendous revulsion. The beating of the measure of the mazurka seemed horrible and maddening. Her thought was directed upon Edwin with the cold fury of which only love is capable. It was not his fault that some rival was nibbling at Ladderedge, but it was his fault that Ladderedge should still be in peril. She saw all her grandiose plan ruined. She felt sure that the rival was powerful and determined, and that Edwin would let him win, either by failing to bid against him, or by mere shilly-shallying. Ladderedge was not the only suitable country residence in the county; there were doubtless many others; but Ladderedge was just what she wanted, and-more important with her-it had become a symbol. She had a misgiving that if they did not get Ladderedge they would remain in Trafalgar Road, Bursley, for ever and ever. Yet, angry and desperate though she was, she somehow did not accuse and arraign Edwin-any more than she would have accused and arraigned a climate. He was in fact the climate in which she lived. A moment ago she had said: "You can't alter him!" But now all the energy of her volition cried out that he must be altered.

"My girl," she said, turning to Janet, "do you think you can stand a scene to-morrow?"

"A scene?" Janet repeated the word guardedly. The look on Hilda's face somewhat alarmed her.

"Between Edwin and me. I'm absolutely determined that we shall take Ladderedge, and I don't care how much of a row we have over it."

"It isn't as bad as all that?" Janet softly murmured, with her skill to soothe.

"Yes it is!" said Hilda violently.

"I was wondering the other day, after one of your letters," Janet proceeded gently, "why after all you were so anxious to go into the country. I thought you wanted Edwin to be on the Town Council or something of that kind. How can he do that if you're right away at a place like Stockbrook?"

"So I should like him to be on the Town Council! But all I really want is to get him away from his business. You don't know, Janet!" she spoke bitterly, and with emotion. "Nobody knows except me. He'll soon be the slave of his business if he keeps on. Oh! I don't mean he stays at nights at it. He scarcely ever does. But he's always thinking about it. He simply can't bear being a minute late for it, everything must give way to it, – he takes that as a matter of course, and that's what annoys me, especially as there's no reason for it, seeing how much he trusts Big James and Simpson. I believe he'd do anything for Big James. He'd listen to Big James far sooner than he'd listen to me… Disagreeable fawning old man, and quite stupid. Simpson isn't so bad. I tell you Edwin only looks on his home as a nice place to be quiet in when he isn't at the works. I've never told him so, and I don't think he suspects it, but I will tell him one of these days. He's very good, Edwin is, in all the little things. He always tries to be just. But he isn't just in the big thing. He's most frightfully unjust. I sometimes wonder where he imagines I come in. Of course he'd do any mortal thing for me-except spare half a minute from the works… What do I care about money? I don't care that much about money. When there's money I can spend it, that's all. But I'd prefer to be poor, and him to be rude and cross and impatient-which he scarcely ever is-than have this feeling all the time that it's the works first, and everything else second. I don't mind for myself-no, really I don't, at least very little! But I do mind for him. I call it humiliating for a man to get like that. It puts everything upside down. Look at Stephen Cheswardine, for instance. There's a pretty specimen! And Edwin'll be as bad as him soon."

"But everyone says how fond Stephen is of his wife!"

"And isn't Edwin fond of me? Stephen Cheswardine despises his wife-only he can't do without her. That's all. And he treats her accordingly. And I shall be the same."

"Oh! Hilda!'

"Yes, I shall. Yes, I shall. But I won't have it. I'd as lief be married to a man like Charles Fearns. He isn't a slave to his business anyhow. I shall get Edwin further away. And when I've got him away I shall see he doesn't go to the works on Saturdays, too. I've quite made up my mind about that. And if he isn't on the Town Council he can be on the County Council-that's quite as good, I hope!"

Never before had Hilda spoken so freely to anyone, not even to Janet. Fierce pride had always kept her self-contained. But now she had no feeling of shame at her outburst. Tears stood in her eyes-and yet she faced Janet, making no effort to hide them.

"My dear!" breathed the deprecating Janet, shocked out of her tepid virginal calm by a revelation of conjugal misery such as had never been vouchsafed to her. She was thinking: "How can the poor thing face her guests after this? Everybody will see that something's happened-it will be awful! She really ought to think of her position."

There was a silence.

The door opened with a sharp sound, and Hilda turned away her head as from the suddenly visible mouth of a cannon. The music could be heard plainly, and beneath it the dull shuffling of feet on the bare boards of the drawing-room. Manna Höst came in radiant, followed by Edwin and Tom Swetnam.

"Well, Hilda," said Edwin, with a slight timid constraint. "I've got rid of your house for you. Here are the deluded victims."

"We have seen every corner of it, Mrs. Clayhanger," said Manna Höst, enthusiastically. "It is lovely. But how can you wish to leave it? It is so practical!"

Perceiving the agitation of Hilda's face, Edwin added in a lower voice to his wife:

"I thought I wouldn't say anything until it was settled, for fear you might be let in for a disappointment. He'll buy it if I leave fifteen hundred on mortgage. So I shall. But of course he wanted her to have a good look at it first."

"How unfair I am!" thought Hilda, as she made some banal remark to Miss Höst. "Don't I know I can always rely on him?"

"Mr. Clayhanger made us promise not to-" Miss Höst began to explain.

"It was just like him!" Hilda interrupted, smiling.

She had a strong desire to jump at Edwin and kiss him. She was saved. Her grandiose plan would proceed. The house sold, Edwin was bound to secure Ladderedge Hall against no matter what rival; and he would do it. But it was the realisation of her power over her husband that gave her the profoundest joy.

About an hour later, when everyone felt that the party was over, the guests, reluctant to leave, and excited afresh by the news that the house had changed hands during the revel, were all assembled in the drawing-room. A few were seated on the chairs which, with the tables, had been pushed against the walls. George had squatted on the carpet rolled up into the hearth, where the fire was extinct; he was not wearing his green shade. The rest were grouped around Manna Höst in the middle of the room.

Miss Höst, the future mistress of the abode, was now more than ever the centre of regard. Apparently as fresh as at the start, and picking delicately at a sweet biscuit, the flushed blonde stood answering questions about her views on England and especially on the Five Towns. She was quite sure of herself, and utterly charming in her confidence. Annunciata Fearns envied her acutely. The other women were a little saddened by the thought of all the disillusions that inevitably lay before her. It was touching to see her glance at Tom Swetnam, convinced that she understood him to the core, and in him all the psychology of his sex.

"Everybody knows," she was saying, "that the English are the finest nation, and I think the Five Towns are much more English than London. That's why I adore the Five Towns. You do not know how English you are here. It makes me laugh because you are so English, and you do not know it. I love you."

"You're flattering us," said Stephen Cheswardine, enchanted with the girl.

Everybody waited in eager delight for her next words. Such tit-bits of attention and laudation did not often fall to the district. It occurred to people that after all the local self-conceit might not be entirely unjustified.

"Ah!" Manna pouted. "But you have spots!"

"Spots!" repeated young Paul Swetnam, amid a general laugh.

She turned to him: "You said there were no spots on Knype Football Club, did you not? Well, there is a spot on you English. You are dreadfully exasperating to us Danes. Oh, I mean it! You are exasperating because you will not show your feelings!"

"Tom, that must be one for you," said Charlie Fearns.

"We're too proud," said Dr. Stirling.

"No," replied Manna maliciously. "It is not pride. You are afraid to show your feelings. It is because you are cowards-in that!"

"We aren't!" cried Hilda, inspired. And yielding to the temptation which had troubled her incessantly ever since she left the boudoir, she put her arms round Edwin and kissed him. "So there!"

"Loud applause!" said young George on the roll of carpet. He said it kindly, but with a certain superiority, perhaps due to the facts that he was wearing a man's "long trousers" for the first time that night, and that he regarded himself as already almost a Londoner. There was some handclapping.

Edwin's eyes had seduced Hilda. Looking at them surreptitiously she had suddenly recalled another of his tricks, – tricks of goodness. When she had told him one evening that Minnie was prematurely the mother of a girl, he had said: "Well, we'll put £130 in the savings bank for the kid." "£130? Whatever are you talking about?" "£130. I received it from America this very morning as ever is." And he showed her a draft on Brown, Shipley & Co. He said 'from America.' He was too delicate to say 'from George Cannon.' It had been a triumphant moment for him. And now, as before them all Hilda held him to her, the delicious thought that she had power over him, that she was shaping the large contours of his existence, made her feel solemn in her bliss. And yet simultaneously she was reflecting with a scarcely perceptible hardness: "It's each for himself in marriage after all, and I've got my own way." And then she noticed the whiteness of his shirt-front under her chin, and that reminded her of his mania for arranging his linen according to his own ideas in his own drawer, and the absurd tidiness of his linen; and she wanted to laugh.

"What a romance she has made of my life!" thought Edwin, confused and blushing, as she loosed him. And though he looked round with affection at the walls which would soon no longer be his, the greatness of the adventure of existence with this creature, to him unique, and the eternal expectation of some new ecstasy, left no room in his heart for a regret.

He caught sight of Ingpen alone in a corner by the piano, nervously stroking his silky beard. The memory of the secret woman in Ingpen's room came back to him. Without any process of reasoning, he felt very sorry for both of them, and he was aware of a certain condescension in himself towards Ingpen.