These Twain

And when the train entered the fiery zone of industry, and slackened speed amid the squalid twilit streets, and stopped at Knype station in front of a crowd of local lowering faces and mackintoshed and gaitered forms, and the damp chill of the Five Towns came in through the opened door of the compartment, her heart fell, and she regretted the elegance of Ealing. But simultaneously her heart was beating with ecstatic expectation. She saw Edwin's face. It was a local face. He wore mourning. He saw her; his eye lighted; his wistful smile appeared. "Yes," she thought, "he is the same as my image of him. He is better than any of them. I am safe. What a shame to have left him all alone! He was quite right-there was no need for it. But I am so impulsive. He must have suffered terribly with those Benbows, and shut out of his own house too." … His hand thrilled her. In the terrible sincerity and outpouring of her kiss she sought to compensate him for all wrongs past and future. Her joy in being near him again made her tingle. His matter-of-fact calmness pleased her. She thought: "I know him, with his matter-of-fact calmness!" "Hello, kid," Edwin addressed George with man-to-man negligence. "Been looking after your mother?" George answered like a Londoner. She had them side by side. It was the fact that George had looked after her. London had matured him; he had picked up a little Ealing. He was past Edwin's shoulder. Indeed he was surprisingly near to being a man. She had both of them. On the platform they surrounded her with their masculine protection. George's secret deep respect for Edwin was not hidden from her.

And yet, all the time, in her joy, reliance, love, admiration, eating him with her eyes, she was condescending to Edwin, – because she had plans for his good. She knew better than he did what would be for his good. And he was a provincial and didn't suspect it. "My poor boy!" she had said gleefully in the cab, pulling suddenly at a loose button of the old grey coat which he wore surreptitiously under his new black overcoat. "My poor boy, what a state you are in!" implying in her tone of affectionate raillery that without her he was a lost man. Through this loose button, she was his mother, his good angel, his saviour. The trifle had led to a general visitation of his wardrobe, conducted by her with metropolitan skill in humouring his susceptibilities.

Edwin now tried on the new office-coat with the self-consciousness that none but an odious dandy can avoid on such occasions.

"It seems warmer than it used to be," he said, pleased to have her beholding him and interesting herself in him, especially in his office. Her presence there, unless it happened to arouse his jealousy for his business independence, always pleasurably excited him. Her muff on the desk had the air of being the muff of a woman who was amorously interested in him, but his relations with whom were not regularised by the law or the church.

"Yes," said she. "I've put some wash-leather inside the lining at the back."

"Why?"

"Well, didn't you say you felt the cold from the window, and it's bad for your liver?"

Her glance said:

"Am I not a clever woman?"

And his replied:

"You are."

"That's the end of that, I hope, darling," she remarked, picking up the old office-coat and dropping it with charming affected disgust into the waste-paper basket.

He shouted for the clerk, who entered with some letters for signature. Under the eyes of his wife Edwin signed them with the demeanour of a secretary of state signing the destiny of provinces, while the clerk respectfully waited.

"I've asked Maggie to come up for the week-end," said Hilda carelessly, when they were alone together, and Edwin was straightening the desk preparatory to departure.

Since her return she had become far more friendly with Maggie than ever before, – not because Maggie had revealed any new charm, but because she saw in Maggie a victim of injustice. Nothing during the week had more severely tested Hilda's new methods of intercourse with Edwin than the disclosure of the provisions of Auntie Hamps's will, which she had at once and definitely set down as monstrous. She simply could not comprehend Edwin's calm acceptance of them, and a month earlier she would have been bitter about it. It was not (she was convinced) that she coveted money, but that she hated unfairness. Why should the Benbows have all Auntie Hamps's possessions, and Edwin and Maggie, who had done a thousand times more for her than the Benbows, nothing? Hilda's conversation implied that the Benbows ought to be ashamed of themselves, and when Edwin pointed out that their good luck was not their fault, only a miracle of self-control had enabled her to say nicely: "That's quite true," instead of sneering: "That's you all over, Edwin!" When she learnt that Edwin would receive not a penny for his labours as executor and trustee for the Benbow children, she was speechless. Perceiving that he did not care for her to discourse upon what she considered to be the wrong done to him, she discoursed upon the wrong done to Maggie-Maggie who was already being deprived by the wicked Albert of interest due to her. And Edwin had to agree with her about Maggie's case. It appeared that Maggie also agreed with her about Maggie's case. As for the Benbows, Hilda had not deigned to say one word to them on the matter. A look, a tone, a silence, had sufficed to express the whole of Hilda's mind to those Benbows.

"Oh!" said Edwin. "So Maggie's coming for the week-end, is she? Well, that's not a bad scheme." He knew that Maggie had been very helpful about servants, and that, the second servant having not yet arrived, she would certainly do much more work in the house than she "made." He pictured her and Hilda becoming still more intimate as they turned sheets and blankets and shook pillows on opposite sides of beds, and he was glad.

"Yes," said Hilda. "I've called there this morning."

"And what's she doing with Minnie?"

"We've settled all that," said Hilda proudly. Edwin had told her in detail the whole story of Minnie, and she had behaved exactly as he had anticipated. Her championship of Minnie had been as passionate as her ruthless verdict upon Minnie's dead mistress. "The girl's aunt was there when I called. We've settled she is to go to Stone, and Maggie and I shall do something for her, and when it's all over I may take her on as housemaid. Maggie says she probably wouldn't make a bad housemaid. Anyhow it's all arranged for the present."

"Then Maggie'll be without a servant?"

"No, she won't. We shall manage that. Besides, I suppose Maggie won't stay on in that house all by herself for ever! … It's just the right size, I see."

"Just!" said Edwin.

He was spreading over his desk a dust-sheet with a red scolloped edging which Hilda had presented to him three days earlier.

She gazed at him with composed and justifiable self-satisfaction, as if saying: "Leave absolutely to me everything in my department, and see how smooth your life will be!"

He would never praise her, and she had a very healthy appetite for praise, which appetite always went hungry. But now, instead of resenting his niggardly reserve, she said to herself: "Poor boy! He can't bring himself to pay compliments; that's it. But his eyes are full of delicious compliments." She was happy, even if apprehensive for the immediate future. There she was, established and respected in his office, which was his church and the successful rival of her boudoir. Her plans were progressing.

She approached the real business of her call:

"I was thinking we might have gone over to see Ingpen this afternoon."

"Well, let's."

Ingpen, convalescent, had insisted, two days earlier, on being removed to his own house, near the village of Stockbrook, a few miles south of Axe. The departure was a surprising example of the mere power of volition on the part of a patient. The routine of hospital life had exasperated the recovering soul of this priest of freedom to such a point that doctor, matron, and friends had had to yield to a mere instinct.

"There's no decent train to go, and none at all to come back until nearly nine o'clock. And we can't cycle in this weather-at least I can't, especially in the dark."

"Well, what about Sunday?"

"The Sunday trains are worse."

"What a ghastly line!" said Edwin. "And they have the cheek to pay five per cent! I remember Ingpen telling me there was one fairish train into Knype in the morning, and one out in the afternoon. And there wouldn't be that if the Locomotive Superintendent didn't happen to live at Axe."

"It's a pity you haven't got a dog-cart, isn't it?" said Hilda, lightly smiling. "Because then we could use the works horse now and then, and it wouldn't really cost anything extra, would it?"

Her heart was beating perceptibly.

Edwin shook his head, agreeably, but with firmness.

"Can't mix up two different things like that!" he said.

She knew it. She was aware of the whole theory of horse-owning among the upper trading-class in the Five Towns. A butcher might use his cob for pleasure on Sundays-he never used it for pleasure on any other day-but traders on a higher plane than butchers drew between the works and the house a line which a works horse was not permitted to cross. One or two, perhaps, – but not the most solid-would put a carter into a livery overcoat and a shabby top-hat and describe him as a coachman while on rare afternoons he drove a landau or a victoria picked up cheap at Axe or Market Drayton. But the majority had no pretensions to the owning of private carriages. The community was not in fact a carriage community. Even the Orgreaves had never dreamed of a carriage. Old Darius Clayhanger would have been staggered into profanity by the suggestion of such a thing. Indeed, until some time after old Clayhanger's death the printing business had been content to deliver all its orders in a boy-pushed handcart. Only when Edwin discovered that, for instance, two thousand catalogues on faced clay paper could not be respectably delivered in a handcart, had he steeled himself to the prodigious move of setting up a stable. He had found an entirely trustworthy ostler-carter with the comfortable name of Unchpin, and, an animal and a tradesman's covered cart having been bought, he had left the affair to Unchpin. Naturally he had never essayed to drive the tradesman's cart. And Edwin Clayhanger could not be seen on the insecure box of a tradesman's cart. He had learnt nothing about horses except that a horse should be watered before, and not after, being fed, that shoeing cost a shilling a week and fodder a shilling a day, and that a horse driven over a hundred and fifty miles a week was likely to get "a bit over" at the knees. At home the horse and cart had always been regarded as being just as exclusively a works item as the printing-machines or the steam-engine.

"I suppose," said Hilda carefully, "you've got all the work one horse can do?"

"And more."

"Well, then, why don't you buy another one?" She tried to speak carelessly, without genuine interest.

"Yes, no doubt!" Edwin answered drily. "And build fresh stables, too."

"Haven't you got room for two?"

"Come along and look, and then perhaps you'll be satisfied."

Buzzers, syrens, and whistles began to sound in the neighbourhood. It was one o'clock.

"Shall I? … Your overcoat collar's turned up behind. Let me do it."

She straightened the collar.

They went out, through the clerk's office. Edwin gave a sideways nod to Simpson. In the passage some girls and a few men were already hurrying forth. None of them took notice of Edwin and Hilda. They all plunged for the street as though the works had been on fire.

"They are in a hurry, my word!" Hilda murmured, with irony.

"And why shouldn't they be?" the employer protested almost angrily.

In the small yard stood the horseless cart, with "Edwin Clayhanger, Lithographer and Steam Printer, Bursley," on both its sides. The stable and cart-shed were in one penthouse, and to get to the stable it was necessary to pass through the cart-shed. Unchpin, a fat man of forty with a face marked by black seams, was bending over a chaff-cutter in the cart-shed. He ignored the intruders. The stable consisted of one large loose-box, in which a grey animal was restlessly moving.

"You see!" Edwin muttered curtly.

"Oh! What a beautiful horse! I've never seen him before."

"Her," Edwin corrected.

"Is it a mare?"

"So they say!"

"I never knew you'd got a fresh one."

"I haven't-yet. I've taken this one for a fortnight's trial, from Chawner… How's she doing, Unchpin?" he called to the cart-shed.

Unchpin looked round and stared.

"Bit light," he growled and turned back to the chaff-cutter, which he seemed to be repairing.

"I thought so," said Edwin.

"But her's a good 'un," he added.

"But where's the old horse?" asked Hilda.

"With God," Edwin replied. "Dropped down dead last week."

"What of?"

Edwin shook his head.

"It's a privilege of horses to do that sort of thing," he said. "They're always doing it."

"You never told me."

"Well, you weren't here, for one thing."

The mare inquisitively but cautiously put her muzzle over the door of the box. Hilda stroked her. The animal's mysterious eyes, her beautiful coat, her broad back, her general bigness relatively to Hilda, the sound of her feet among the litter on the paving stones, the smell of the stable, – these things enchanted Hilda.

"I should adore horses!" she breathed, half to herself, ecstatically; and wondered whether she would ever be able to work her will on Edwin in the matter of a dog-cart. She pictured herself driving the grey mare, who had learnt to love her, in a flashing dog-cart, Edwin by her side on the front-seat. Her mind went back enviously to Tavy Mansion and Dartmoor. But she felt that Edwin had not enough elasticity to comprehend the rapture of her dream. She foresaw nearly endless trouble and altercation and chicane before she could achieve her end. She was ready to despair, but she remembered her resolutions and took heart.

"I say, Unchpin," said Edwin. "I suppose this box couldn't be made into two stalls?"

Unchpin on his gaitered legs clumped towards the stable, and gazed gloomily into the box. When he had gazed for some time, he touched his cap to Hilda.

"It could," he announced.

"Could you get a trap into the shed as well as the cart?"

"Ay! If ye dropped th' shafts o' th' trap under th' cart. What of it, mester?"

"Nothing. Only missis is going to have this mare."

After a pause, Unchpin muttered:

"Missis, eh!"

Hilda had moved a little away into the yard. Edwin approached her, flushing slightly, and with a self-consciousness which he tried to dissipate with one wink. Hilda's face was set hard.

"I must just go back to the office," she said, in a queer voice.

She walked quickly, Edwin following. Simpson beheld their return with gentle surprise. In the private office Hilda shut the door. She then ran to the puzzled Edwin, and kissed him with the most startling vehemence, clasping her arms-in one hand she still held the muff-round his neck. She loved him for being exactly as he was. She preferred his strange, uncouth method of granting a request, of yielding, of flattering her caprice, to any politer, more conventional methods of the metropolis. She thought that no other man could be as deeply romantic as Edwin. She despised herself for ever having been misled by the surface of him. And even the surface of him she saw now as it were, through the prism of passionate affection, to be edged with the blending colours of the rainbow. And when they came again out of the office, after the sacred rite, and Edwin, as uplifted as she, glanced back nevertheless at the sheeted desk and the safe and the other objects in the room with the half-mechanical habitual solicitude of a man from whom the weight of responsibility is never lifted, she felt saddened because she could not enter utterly into his impenetrable soul, and live through all his emotions, and comprehend like a creator the always baffling wistfulness of his eyes. This sadness was joy; it was the aura of her tremendous satisfaction in his individuality and in her triumph and in the thought: "I alone stand between him and desolation."

II

"Wo!" exclaimed Hilda broadly, bringing the mare and the vehicle to a standstill in front of the "Live and Let Live" inn in the main street of the village of Stockbrook, which lay about a mile and a half off the high road from the Five Towns to Axe. And immediately the mare stopped she was enveloped in her own vapour.

"Ha!" exclaimed Edwin, with faint benevolent irony. "And no bones broken!"

A man came out from the stable-yard.

The village of Stockbrook gave the illusion that hundreds of English villages were giving that Christmas morning, – the illusion that its name was Arcadia, that finality had been reached, and that the forces of civilisation could go no further. More suave than a Dutch village, incomparably neater and cleaner and more delicately finished than a French village, it presented, in the still, complacent atmosphere of long tradition, a picturesque medley of tiny architectures nearly every aspect of which was beautiful. And if seven people of different ages and sexes lived in a two-roomed cottage under a thatched roof hollowed by the weight of years, without drains and without water, and also without freedom, the beholder was yet bound to conclude that by some mysterious virtue their existence must be gracious, happy, and in fact ideal-especially on Christmas Day, though Christmas Day was also Quarter Day-and that they would not on any account have it altered in the slightest degree. Who could believe that fathers of families drank away their children's bread in the quaint tap-room of that creeper-clad hostel-a public-house fit to produce ecstasy in the heart of every American traveller-"The Live and Let Live"? Who could have believed that the Wesleyan Methodists already singing a Christmas hymn inside the dwarf Georgian conventicle, and their fellow-Christians straggling under the lych into the church-yard, scorned one another with an immortal detestation, each claiming a monopoly in knowledge of the unknowable? But after all the illusion of Arcadia was not entirely an illusion. In this calm, rime-decked, Christmas-imbued village, with its motionless trees enchanted beneath a vast grey impenetrable cloud, a sort of relative finality had indeed been reached, – the end of an epoch that was awaiting dissolution.

Edwin had not easily agreed to the project of shutting up house for the day and eating the Christmas dinner with Tertius Ingpen. Although customarily regarding the ritual of Christmas, with its family visits, its exchange of presents, its feverish kitchen activity, its somewhat insincere gaiety, its hours of boredom, and its stomachic regrets, as an ordeal rather than a delight, he nevertheless abandoned it with reluctance and a sense of being disloyal to something sacred. But the situation of Ingpen, Hilda's strong desire and her teasing promise of a surprise, and the still continuing dearth of servants had been good arguments to persuade him.

And though he had left Trafalgar Road moody and captious, thinking all the time of the deserted and cold home, he had arrived in Stockbrook tingling and happy, and proud of Hilda, – proud of her verve, her persistency, and her success. She had carried him very far on the wave of her new enthusiasm for horse-traction. She had beguiled him into immediately spending mighty sums on a dog-cart, new harness, rugs, a driving-apron, and a fancy whip. She had exhausted Unchpin, upset the routine of the lithographic business, and gravely overworked the mare, in her determination to learn to drive. She had had the equipage out at night for her lessons. On the other hand she had not in the least troubled herself about the purchase of a second horse for mercantile purposes, and a second horse had not yet been bought.

When she had announced that she would herself drive her husband and son over to Stockbrook, Edwin had absolutely negatived the idea; but Unchpin had been on her side; she had done the double journey with Unchpin, who judged her capable and the mare (eight years old) quite reliable, and who moreover wanted Christmas as much as possible to himself. And Hilda had triumphed. Walking the mare uphill-and also downhill-she had achieved Stockbrook in safety; and the conquering air with which she drew up at the "Live and Let Live" was delicious. The chit's happiness and pride radiated out from her. It seemed to Edwin that by the mere strength of violition she had actually created the dog-cart and its appointments, and the mare too! And he thought that he himself had not lived in vain if he could procure her such sensations as her glowing face then displayed. Her occasionally overbearing tenacity, and the little jars which good resolutions several weeks old had naturally not been powerful enough to prevent, were forgotten and forgiven. He would have given all his savings to please her caprice, and been glad. A horse and trap, or even a pair of horses and a landau, were a trifling price to pay for her girlish joy and for his own tranquillity in his beloved house and business.

"Catch me, both of you!" cried Hilda.

Edwin had got down, and walked round behind the vehicle to the footpath, where George stood grinning. The stableman, in classic attitude, was at the mare's head.

Hilda jumped rather wildly. It was Edwin who countered the shock of her descent. The edge of her velvet hat knocked against his forehead, disarranging his cap. He could smell the velvet, as for an instant he held his wife-strangely acquiescent and yielding-in his arms, and there was something intimately feminine in the faint odour. All Hilda's happiness seemed to pass into him, and that felicity sufficed for him. He did not desire any happiness personal to himself. He wanted only to live in her. His contentment was profound, complete, rapturous.

And yet in the same moment, reflecting that Hilda would certainly have neglected the well-being of the mare, he could say to the stableman:

"Put the rug over her, will you?"

"Hello! Here's Mr. Ingpen!" announced George, as he threw the coloured rug on the mare.

Ingpen, pale and thickly enveloped, came slowly round the bend of the road, waving and smiling. He had had a relapse, after a too early sortie, and was recovering from it.

"I made sure you'd be about here," he said, shaking hands. "Merry Christmas, all!"

"Ought you to be out, my lad?" Edwin asked heartily.

"Out? Yes. I'm as fit as a fiddle. And I've been ordered mild exercise." He squared off gaily against George and hit the stout adolescent in the chest.

"What about all your parcels, Hilda?" Edwin enquired.

"Oh! We'll call for them afterwards."

"Afterwards?"

"Yes. Come along-before you catch a chill." She winked openly at Ingpen, who returned the wink. "Come along, dear. It's not far. We have to walk across the fields."

"Put her up, sir?" the stableman demanded of Edwin.

"Yes. And give her a bit of a rub down," he replied absently, remembering various references of Hilda's to a surprise. His heart misgave him. Ingpen and Hilda looked like plotters, very intimate and mischievous. He had a notion that living with a woman was comparable to living with a volcano-you never knew when a dangerous eruption might not occur.

Within three minutes the first and minor catastrophe had occurred.

"Bit sticky, this field path of yours," said Edwin, uneasily.

They were all four slithering about in brown clay under a ragged hedge in which a few red berries glowed.

"It was as hard as iron the day before yesterday," said Hilda.

"Oh! So you were here the day before yesterday, were you? … What's that house there?" Edwin turned to Ingpen.

"He's guessed it in one!" Ingpen murmured, and then went off into his characteristic crescendo laugh.

The upper part of a late eighteenth-century house, squat and square, with yellow walls, black uncurtained windows, high slim chimney, and a blue slate roof, showed like a gigantic and mysterious fruit in a clump of variegated trees, some of which were evergreen.

"Ladderedge Hall, my boy," said Ingpen. "Seat of the Beechinors for about a hundred years."

"'Seat', eh!" Edwin murmured sarcastically.