These Twain

He dwelt tenderly on the invisible image of the woman upstairs. It was marvellous how she was not the Hilda he had married. The new Hilda had so overlaid and hidden the old, that he had positively to make an effort to recall what the old one was, with her sternness and her anxious air of responsibility. But at the same time she was the old Hilda too. He desired to be splendidly generous, to environ her with all luxuries, to lift her clear above other women; he desired the means to be senselessly extravagant for her. To clasp on her arm a bracelet whose cost would keep a workingman's family for three years would have delighted him. And though he was interested in social schemes, and had a social conscience, he would sooner have bought that bracelet, and so purchased the momentary thrill of putting it on her capricious arm, than have helped to ameliorate the lot of thousands of victimised human beings. He had Hilda in his bones and he knew it, and he knew that it was a grand and a painful thing.

Nevertheless he was not without a considerable self-satisfaction, for he had done very well by Hilda. He had found her at the mercy of the world, and now she was safe and sheltered and beloved, and made mistress of a house and home that would stand comparison with most houses and homes. He was proud of his house; he always watched over it; he was always improving it; and he would improve it more and more; and it should never be quite finished.

The disorder in it, now, irked him. He walked to and fro, and restored every piece of furniture to its proper place, heaped the contents of the ash-trays into one large ash-tray, covered some of the food, and locked up the alcohol. He did this leisurely, while thinking of the woman upstairs, and while eating two chocolates, – not more, because he had notions about his stomach. Then he shut and bolted the drawing-room window, and opened the door leading to the cellar steps and sniffed, so as to be quite certain that the radiator furnace was not setting the house on fire. And then he extinguished the lights, and the hall-light last of all, and his sole illumination was the gas on the first-floor landing inviting him upstairs.

Standing on the dark stairs, on his way to bed, eager and yet reluctant to mount, he realised the entity of the house. He thought of the astounding and mysterious George, and of those uncomprehended beings, Ada and the cook in their attic, sleeping by the side of the portrait of a fireman in uniform. He felt sure that one or both of them had been privy to George's unlawful adventures, and he heartily liked them for shielding the boy. And he thought of his wife, moving about in the bedroom upon which she had impressed her individuality. He went upstairs… Yes, he should proceed with the enterprise of the new works. He had the courage for it now. He was rich, according to Bursley ideas, – he would be far richer… He gave a faint laugh at the memory of George's objection to Bert's choice of a bicycle as a gift from heaven.

II

Hilda was brushing her hair. The bedroom seemed to be full of her and the disorder of her multitudinous things. Whenever he asked why a particular item of her goods was in a particular spot-the spot appearing to him to have been bizarrely chosen-she always proved to her own satisfaction, by a quite improvised argument, that that particular spot was the sole possible spot for that particular item. The bedroom was no longer theirs-it was hers. He picnicked in it. He didn't mind. In fact he rather liked the picnic. It pleased him to exercise his talent for order and organisation, so as to maintain his own comfort in the small spaces which she left to him. To-night the room was in a divine confusion. He accepted it with pleasure. The beds had not been turned down, because it was improper to turn them down when they were to be used for the deposit of strangers' finery. On Edwin's bed now lay the dress which Hilda had taken off. It was a most agreeable object on the bed, and seemed even richer and more complex there than on Hilda. He removed it carefully to a chair. An antique diaphanous shawl remained, which was unfamiliar to him.

"What's this shawl?" he asked. "I've never seen this shawl before. What is it?"

Hilda was busy, her bent head buried in hair.

"Oh, Edwin, what an old fusser you are!" she mumbled. "What shawl?"

He held it up.

"Someone must have left it."

He proceeded with the turning down of his bed. Then he sat on a chair to regard Hilda.

When she had done her hair she padded across the room and examined the shawl.

"What a precious thing!" she exclaimed. "It's Mrs. Fearns's. She must have taken it off to put her jacket on, and then forgotten it. But I'd no idea how good it was. It's genuine old. I wonder how it would suit me?"

She put it round her shoulders, and then stood smiling, posing, bold, provocative, for his verdict. The whiteness of her deshabille showed through the delicate pattern and tints of the shawl, with a strange effect. For him she was more than a woman; she was the incarnation of a sex. It was marvellous how all she did, all her ideas and her gestures, were so intensely feminine, so sure to perturb or enchant him. Nervously he began to wind his watch. He wanted to spring up and kiss her because she was herself. But he could not. So he said:

"Come here, chit. Let me look at that shawl."

She obeyed. She knelt acquiescent. He put his watch back into his pocket, and fingered the shawl.

Then she said:

"I suppose one'll be allowed to grumble at Georgie for locking his bedroom door." And she said it with a touch of mockery in her clear, precise voice, as though twitting him, and Ingpen too, about their absurd theoretical sense of honour towards children. And there was a touch of fine bitterness in her voice also, – a reminiscence of the old Hilda. Incalculable creature! Who could have guessed that she would make such a remark at such a moment? In his mind he dashed George to pieces. But as a wise male he ignored all her implications and answered casually, mildly, with an affirmative.

She went on:

"What were you talking such a long time to Johnnie Orgreave about?"

"Talking a long time to Johnnie Orgreave? Oh! D'you mean at the front-door? Why, it wasn't half a minute! He happened to mention a piece of land down at Shawport that I had a sort of a notion of buying."

"Buying? What for?" Her tone hardened.

"Well, supposing I had to build a new works?"

"You never told me anything about it."

"I've only just begun to think of it myself. You see, if I'm to go in for lithography as it ought to be gone in for, I can't possibly stay at the shop. I must have more room, and a lot more. And it would be cheaper to build than to rent."

She stood up.

"Why go in more for lithography?"

"You can't stand still in business. Must either go forward or go back."

"It seems to me it's very risky. I wondered what you were hiding from me."

"My dear girl, I was not hiding anything from you," he protested.

"Whose land is it?"

"It belongs to Tobias Hall's estate."

"Yes, and I've no doubt the Halls would be very glad to get rid of it. Who told you about it?"

"Johnnie."

"Of course it would be a fine thing for him too."

"But I'd asked him if he knew of any land going cheap."

She shrugged her shoulders, and shrugged away the disinterestedness of all Orgreaves.

"Anyone could get the better of you," she said.

He resented this estimate of himself as a good-natured simpleton. He assuredly did not want to quarrel, but he was obliged to say:

"Oh! Could they?"

An acerbity scarcely intentional somehow entered into his tone. As soon as he heard it he recognised the tone as the forerunner of altercations.

"Of course!" she insisted, superiorly, and then went on: "We're all right as we are. We spend too much money, but I daresay we're all right. If you go in for a lot of new things you may lose all we've got, and then where shall we be?"

In his heart he said to her:

"What's it got to do with you? You manage your home, and I'll manage my business! You know nothing at all about business. You're the very antithesis of business. Whatever business you've ever had to do with you've ruined. You've no right to judge and no grounds for judgment. It's odious of you to asperse any of the Orgreaves. They were always your best friends. I should never have met you if it hadn't been for them. And where would you be now without me? Trying to run some wretched boarding-house and probably starving. Why do you assume that I'm a d-d fool? You always do. Let me tell you that I'm one of the most common-sense men in this town, and everybody knows it except you. Anyhow I was clever enough to get you out of a mess… You knew I was hiding something from you, did you? I wish you wouldn't talk such infernal rot. And moreover I won't have you interfering in my business. Other wives don't, and you shan't. So let that be clearly understood." In his heart he was very ill-used and very savage.

But he only said:

"Well, we shall see."

She retorted:

"Naturally if you've made up your mind, there's no more to be said."

He broke out viciously:

"I've not made up my mind. Don't I tell you I've only just begun to think about it?"

He was angry. And now that he actually was angry, he took an almost sensual pleasure in being angry. He had been angry before, though on a smaller scale, with less provocation, and he had sworn that he would never be angry again. But now that he was angry again, he gloomily and fiercely revelled in it.

Hilda silently folded up the shawl, and, putting it into a drawer of the wardrobe, shut the drawer with an irritatingly gentle click… Click! He could have killed her for that click… She seized a dressing-gown.

"I must just go and look at George," she murmured, with cool, clear calmness, – the virtuous, anxious mother; not a trace of coquetry anywhere in her.

"What bosh!" he thought. "She knows perfectly well George's door is bolted."

Marriage was a startling affair. Who could have foretold this finish to the evening? Nothing had occurred … nothing … and yet everything. His plans were all awry. He could see naught but trouble.

She was away some time. When she returned, he was in bed, with his face averted. He heard her moving about.

"Will she, or won't she, come and kiss me?" he thought.

She came and kissed him, but it was a meaningless kiss.

"Good-night," she said, aloofly.

"'Night."

She slept. But he could not sleep. He kept thinking the same thought: "She's no right whatever… I must say I never bargained for this…" etc.

CHAPTER VII

THE TRUCE

I

Nearly a week passed. Hilda, in the leisure of a woman of fashion after dinner, was at the piano in the drawing-room. She had not urgent stockings to mend, nor jam to make, nor careless wenches to overlook, nor food to buy, nor accounts to keep, nor a new dress to scheme out of an old one, nor to perform her duty to her neighbour. She had nothing to do. Like Edwin, she could not play the piano, but she had picked up a note here and a note there in the course of her life, and with much labour and many slow hesitations she could puzzle out a chord or a melody from the printed page. She was now exasperatingly spelling with her finger a fragment of melody from one of Dvorak's "Legends," – a fragment that had inhabited her mind since she first heard it, and that seemed to gather up and state all the sweet heart-breaking intolerable melancholy implicit in the romantic existence of that city on the map, Prague. On the previous day she had been a quarter of an hour identifying the unforgetable, indismissible fragment amid the multitude of notes. Now she had recognisably pieced its phrases together, and as her stiff finger stumbled through it, her ears heard it, once more; and she could not repeat it often enough. What she heard was not what she was playing but something finer, – her souvenir of what Tertius Ingpen had played; and something finer than that, something finer than the greatest artist could possibly play-magic!

It was in the nature of a miracle to her that she had been able to reproduce the souvenir in physical sound. She was proud of herself as a miracle-worker, and somewhat surprised. And at the same time she was abject because she "could not play the piano." She thought that she would be ready to sacrifice many happinesses in order to be able to play as well as even George played, that she would exchange all her own gifts multiplied by a hundred in order to be able to play as Janet Orgreave played, and that to be a world-renowned pianist dominating immense audiences in European capitals must mean the summit of rapture and glory. (She had never listened to a world-renowned pianist.) Meanwhile, without the ennui and slavery of practice, she was enchanting herself; and she savoured her idleness, and thought of her young pretty servants at work, and her boy loose and at large, and her husband keeping her, and of the intensity of beautiful sorrow palpitating behind the mediæval façades of Prague. Had Ingpen overheard her, he might have demanded: "Who is making that infernal noise on the piano?"

Edwin came into the room, holding a thick green book. He ought long ago to have been back at the works (or "shop," as it was still called, because it had once been principally a shop), keeping her.

"Hello!" she murmured, without glancing away from the piano. "I thought you were gone."

They had not quarrelled; but they had not made peace; and the open question of lithography and the new works still separated them. Sometimes they had approached each other, pretending amiably or even affectionately that there was no open question. But the reality of the question could not be destroyed by any pretence of ignoring it.

While gazing at the piano, Hilda could also see Edwin. She thought she knew him, but she was always making discoveries in this branch of knowledge. Now and then she was so bewildered by discoveries that she came to wonder why she had married him, and why people do marry-really! The fact was that she had married him for the look in his eyes. It was a sad look, and beyond that it could not be described. Also, a little, she had married him for his bright untidy hair, and for that short oblique shake of the head which with him meant a greeting or an affirmative. She had not married him for his sentiments nor for his goodness of heart. Some points in him she did not like. He had a tendency to colds, and she hated him whenever he had a cold. She often detested his terrible tidiness, though it was a convenient failing. More and more she herself wilfully enjoyed being untidy, as her mother had been untidy… And to think that her mother's untidiness used to annoy her! On the other hand she found pleasure in humouring Edwin's crotchettiness in regard to the details of a meal. She did not like his way of walking, which was ungainly, nor his way of standing, which was infirm. She preferred him to be seated. She could not but regret his irresolution, and his love of ease. However, the look in his eyes was paramount, because she was in love with him. She knew that he was more deeply and helplessly in love with her than she with him, but even she was perhaps tightlier bound than in her pride she thought.

Her love had the maladies of a woman's love when it is great; these may possibly be also the maladies of a man's love. It could be bitter. Certainly it could never rest from criticism, spoken or unspoken. In the presence of others she would criticise him to herself, if not aloud, nearly all the time; the ordeal was continuous. When she got him alone she would often endow him at a stroke with perfection, and her tenderness would pour over him. She trusted him profoundly; and yet she had constant misgivings, which weakened or temporarily destroyed her confidence. She would treat a statement from him with almost hostile caution, and accept blindly the very same statement from a stranger! Her habit was to assume that in any encounter between him and a stranger he would be worsted. She was afraid for him. She felt that she could protect him better than he could protect himself, – against any danger whatever. This instinct to protect him was also the instinct of self-protection; for peril to him meant peril to her. And she had had enough of peril. After years of disastrous peril she was safe and George was safe. And if she was passionately in love with Edwin, she was also passionately in love with safety. She had breathed a long sigh of relief, and from a desperate self-defender had become a woman. She lay back, as it were, luxuriously on a lounge, after exhausting and horrible exertions; she had scarcely ceased to pant. At the least sign of recurring danger all her nerves were on the qui vive. Hence her inimical attitude towards the project of the new works and the extension of lithography in Bursley. The simpleton (a moment earlier the perfect man) might ruin himself-and her! In her view he was the last person to undertake such an enterprise.

Since her marriage, Clara, Maggie, and Auntie Hamps had been engaged in the pleasant endless task of telling her all about everything that related to the family, and she had been permitted to understand that Edwin, though utterly admirable, was not of a creative disposition, and that he had done nothing but conserve what his father had left. Without his father Edwin "would have been in a very different position." She believed this. Every day, indeed, Edwin, by the texture of his hourly life, proved the truth of it… All the persons standing to make a profit out of the new project would get the better of his fine ingenuous temperament-naturally! She knew the world. Did Edwin suppose that she did not know what the world was? … And then the interminable worry of the new enterprise-misgivings, uncertainties, extra work, secret preoccupations! What room for love, what hope of tranquillity in all that? He might argue- But she did not want to argue; she would not argue. She was dead against the entire project. He had not said to her that it was no affair of hers, but she knew that such was his thought, and she resented the attitude. No affair of hers? When it threatened her felicity? No! She would not have it. She was happy and secure. And while lying luxuriously back in her lounge she would maintain all the defences of her happiness and her security.

II

Holding the green book in front of her, Edwin said quietly:

"Read this!"

"Which?"

He pointed with his finger.

She read:

"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained.

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."

Edwin had lately been exciting himself, not for the first time, over Walt Whitman.

"Fine, isn't it?" he said, sure that she would share his thrill.

"Magnificent!" she agreed with quiet enthusiasm. "I must read more of that." She gazed over the top of the book through the open blue-curtained window into the garden.

He withdrew the book and closed it.

"You haven't got that tune exactly right, you know," he said, jerking his head in the direction of the music.

"Oh!" She was startled. What did he know about it? He could not play the piano.

"Where are you?" he asked. "Show me. Where's the confounded place on the piano? Well! At the end you play it like this." He imitated her. "Whereas it ought to be like this." He played the last four notes differently.

"So it ought!" She murmured with submission, after having frowned.

"That bit of a tune's been running in my head, too," he said.

The strange beauty of Whitman and the strange beauty of Dvorak seemed to unite, and both Edwin and Hilda were uplifted, not merely by these mingled beauties, but by their realisation of the wondrous fact that they both took intense pleasure in the same varied forms of beauty. Happiness rose about them like a sweet smell in the spaces of the comfortable impeccable drawing-room. And for a moment they leaned towards each other in bliss-across the open question… Was it still open? … Ah! Edwin might be ingenuous, a simpleton, but Hilda admitted the astounding, mystifying adroitness of his demeanour. Had he abandoned the lithographic project, or was he privately nursing it? In his friendliness towards herself was there a reserve, or was there not? She knew … she did not know … she knew… Yes, there was a reserve, but it was so infinitesimal that she could not define it, – could not decide whether it was due to obstinacy of purpose, or merely to a sense of injury, whether it was resentful or condescending. Exciting times! And she perceived that her new life was gradually getting fuller of such excitements.

"Well," said he. "It's nearly three. Quarter-day's coming along. I'd better be off down and earn a bit towards Maggie's rent."

Before the June quarter-day, he had been jocular in the same way about Maggie's rent. In the division of old Darius Clayhanger's estate Maggie had taken over the Clayhanger house, and Edwin paid rent to her therefor.

"I wish you wouldn't talk like that," said Hilda, pouting amiably.

"Why not?"

"Well, I wish you wouldn't."

"Anyhow, the rent has to be paid, I suppose."

"And I wish it hadn't. I wish we didn't live in Maggie's house."

"Why?"

"I don't like the idea of it."

"You're sentimental."

"You can call it what you like. I don't like the idea of us living in Maggie's house. I never feel as if I was at home. No, I don't feel as if I was at home."

"What a kid you are!"

"You won't change me," she persisted stoutly.

He knew that she was not sympathetic towards the good Maggie. And he knew the reasons for her attitude, though they had never been mentioned. One was mere vague jealousy of Maggie as her predecessor in the house. The other was that Maggie was always very tepid towards George. George had annoyed her on his visits previous to his mother's marriage, and moreover Maggie had dimly resented Edwin's interest in the son of a mysterious woman. If she had encountered George after the proclamation of Edwin's engagement she would have accepted the child with her customary cheerful blandness. But she had encountered him too soon, and her puzzled gaze had said to George: "Why is my brother so taken up with you? There must be an explanation, and your strange mother is the explanation." Edwin did not deny Maggie's attitude to George, but he defended Maggie as a human being. Though dull, "she was absolutely the right sort," and the very slave of duty and loyalty. He would have liked to make Hilda see all Maggie's excellences.

"Do you know what I've been thinking?" Hilda went on. "Suppose you were to buy the house from Maggie? Then it would be ours."

He answered with a smile:

"What price 'the mania for owning things'? … Would you like me to?" There was promise in his roguish voice.

"Oh! I should. I've often thought of it," she said eagerly. And at the same time all her gestures and glances seemed to be saying: "Humour me! I appeal to you as a girl pouting and capricious. But humour me. You know it gives you pleasure to humour me. You know you like me not to be too reasonable. We both know it. I want you to do this."

It was not the fact that she had often thought of the plan. But in her eagerness she imagined it to be the fact. She had never seriously thought of the plan until that moment, and it appeared doubly favourable to her now, because the execution of it, by absorbing capital, ought to divert Edwin from his lithographic project, and perhaps render the lithographic project impossible for years.

She added, aloud:

"Then you wouldn't have any rent to pay."

"How true!" said Edwin, rallying her. "But it would stand me in a loss, because I should have to pay too much for the place."

"Why?" she cried, in arms. "Why should Maggie ask too much just because you want it? And think of all the money you've spent on it!"