Bennett Arnold
These Twain
"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.
"It's been empty for two years," remarked Hilda brightly. "So we thought we'd have a look at it."
And Edwin said to himself that he had divined all along what the surprise was. It was astounding that a man could pass with such rapidity as Edwin from vivid joy to black and desolate gloom. She well knew that the idea of living in the country was extremely repugnant to him, and that nothing would ever induce him to consent to it. And yet she must needs lay this trap for him, prepare this infantile surprise, and thereby spoil his Christmas, she who a few moments earlier had been the embodiment of surrender in his arms! He said no word. He hummed a few notes and glanced airily to right and left with an effort after unconcern. The presence of Ingpen and the boy, and the fact of Christmas, forbade him to speak freely. He could not suddenly stop and drive his stick into the earth and say savagely:
"Now listen to me! Once for all, I won't have this country house idea! So let it be understood, – if you want a row, you know how to get it."
The appearance of amity-and the more high-spirited the better-must be kept up throughout the day. Nevertheless in his heart he challenged Hilda desperately. All her good qualities became insignificant, all his benevolent estimates of her seemed ridiculous. She was the impossible woman. He saw a tremendous vista of unpleasantness, for her obstinacy in warfare was known to him, together with her perfect lack of scruple, of commonsense, and of social decency. He had made her a present of a horse and trap-solely to please her-and this was his reward! The more rope you gave these creatures, the more they wanted! But he would give no more rope. Compromise was at an end. The battle would be joined that night… In his grim and resolute dejection there was something almost voluptuous. He continued to glance airily about, and at intervals to hum a few notes.
Over a stile they dropped into a rutty side-road, and opposite was the worn iron gate of Ladderedge Hall, with a house-agent's board on it. A short curved gravel drive, filmed with green, led to the front-door of the house. In front were a lawn and a flower-garden, beyond a paddock, and behind a vegetable garden and a glimpse of stabling; a compact property! Ingpen drew a great key from his pocket. The plotters were all prepared; they took their victim for a simpleton, a ninny, a lamb!
In the damp echoing interior Edwin gazed without seeing, and heard as in a dream without listening. This was the hall, this the dining-room, this the drawing-room, this the morning-room… White marble mantelpieces, pre-historic grates, wall-paper hanging in strips, cobwebs, uneven floors, scaly ceilings, the invisible vapour of human memories! This was the kitchen, enormous; then the larder, enormous, and the scullery still more enormous (with a pump-handle flanking the slopstone)! No water. No gas. And what was this room opening out of the kitchen? Oh! That must be the servants' hall… Servants' hall indeed! Imagine Edwin Clayhanger living in a "Hall," with a servants' hall therein! Snobbishness unthinkable! He would not be able to look his friends in the face… On the first floor, endless bedrooms, but no bath-room. Here, though, was a small bedroom that would make a splendid bath-room… Ingpen, the ever expert, conceived a tank-room in the roof, and traced routes for plumbers' pipes. George, excited, and comprehending that he must conduct himself as behoved an architect, ran up to the attic floor to study on the spot the problem of the tank-room, and Ingpen followed. Edwin stared out of a window at the prospect of the Arcadian village lying a little below across the sloping fields.
"Come along, Edwin," Hilda coaxed.
Yes, she had pretended a deep concern for the welfare of the suffering feckless bachelor, Tertius Ingpen. She had paid visit after visit in order to watch over his convalescence. Choosing to ignore his scorn for all her sex, she had grown more friendly with him than even Edwin had ever been. Indeed by her sympathetic attentions she had made Edwin seem callous in comparison. And all the time she had merely been pursuing a private design-with what girlish deceitfulness.
In the emptiness of the house the voices of Ingpen and George echoed from above down the second flight of stairs.
"No good going to the attics," muttered Edwin, on the landing.
Hilda, half cajoling, half fretful, protested:
"Now, Edwin, don't be disagreeable."
He followed her on high, martyrised. The front wall of the house rose nearly to the top of the attic windows, screening and darkening them.
"Cheerful view!" Edwin growled.
He heard Ingpen saying that the place could be had on a repairing lease for sixty-five pounds a year, and that perhaps £1,200 would buy it. Dirt cheap.
"Ah!" Edwin murmured. "I know those repairing leases. £1,000 wouldn't make this barn fit to live in."
He knew that Ingpen and Hilda exchanged glances.
"It's larger than Tavy Mansion," said Hilda.
Tavy Mansion! There was the secret! Tavy Mansion was at the bottom of her scheme. Alicia Hesketh had a fine house, and Hilda must have a finer. She, Hilda, of all people, was a snob. He had long suspected it.
He rejoined sharply: "Of course it isn't larger than Tavy Mansion! It isn't as large."
"Oh! Edwin. How can you say such things!"
In the portico, as Ingpen was re-locking the door, the husband said negligently, superiorly, cheerfully:
"It's not so bad. I expect there's hundreds of places like this up and down the country-going cheap."
The walk back to the "Live and Let Live" was irked by constraint, against which everyone fought nobly, smiling, laughing, making remarks about cockrobins, the sky, the Christmas dinner.
"So I hear it's settled you're going to London when you leave school, kiddie," said Tertius Ingpen, to bridge over a fearful hiatus in the prittle-prattle.
George, so big now and so mannishly dressed as to be amused and not a bit hurt by the appellation "kiddie," confirmed the statement in his deepening voice.
Edwin thought:
"It's more than I hear, anyway!"
Hilda had told him that during the visit to London the project for articling George to Johnnie Orgreave had been revived, but she had not said that a decision had been taken. Though Edwin from careful pride had not spoken freely-George being Hilda's affair and not his-he had shown no enthusiasm. Johnnie Orgreave had sunk permanently in his esteem-scarcely less so than Jimmie, whose conjugal eccentricities had scandalised the Five Towns and were achieving the ruin of the Orgreave practice; or than Tom, who was developing into a miser. Moreover, he did not at all care for George going to London. Why should it be thought necessary for George to go to London? The sagacious and successful provincial in Edwin was darkly jealous of London, as a rival superficial and brilliant. And now he learnt from Ingpen that George's destiny was fixed… A matter of small importance, however!
Did "they" seriously expect him to travel from Ladderedge Hall to his works, and from his works to Ladderedge Hall every week-day of his life? He laughed sardonically to himself.
Out came the sun, which George greeted with a cheer. And Edwin, to his own surprise, began to feel hungry.
III
"I shan't take that house, you know," said Edwin, casually and yet confidentially, in a pause which followed a long analysis, by Ingpen, of Ingpen's sensations in hospital before he was out of danger.
They sat on opposite sides of a splendid extravagant fire in Ingpen's dining-room.
Ingpen, sprawling in a shabby, uncomfortable easychair, and flushed with the activity of digestion, raised his eyebrows, squinted down at the cigarette between his lips, and answered impartially:
"No. So I gather. Of course you must understand it was Hilda's plan to go up there. I merely fell in with it, – simplest thing to do in these cases!"
"Certainly."
Thus they both condescended to the feather-headed capricious woman, dismissed her, and felt a marked access of sincere intimacy on a plane of civilisation exclusively masculine.
In the succeeding silence of satisfaction and relief could be heard George, in the drawing-room above, practising again the piano part of a Haydn violin sonata which he had very nervously tried over with Ingpen while they were awaiting dinner.
Ingpen said suddenly:
"I say, old chap! Why have you never mentioned that you happened to meet a certain person in my room at Hanbridge that night you went over there for me?" He frowned.
Edwin had a thrill, pleasurable and apprehensive, at the prospect of a supreme confidence.
"It was no earthly business of mine," he answered lightly. But his tone conveyed: "You surely ought to be aware that my loyalty and my discretion are complete."
And Ingpen, replying to Edwin's tone, said with a simple directness that flattered Edwin to the heart:
"Naturally I knew I was quite safe in your hands… I've reassured the lady." Ingpen smiled slightly.
Edwin was too proud to tell Ingpen that he had not said a word to Hilda, and Ingpen was too proud to tell Edwin that he assumed as much.
At that moment Hilda came into the room, murmuring a carol that some children of Stockbrook had sung on the doorstep during dinner.
"Don't be afraid-I'm not going to interrupt. I know you're in the thick of it," said she archly, not guessing how exactly truthful she was.
Ingpen, keeping his presence of mind in the most admirable manner, rejoined with irony:
"You don't mean to say you've finished already explaining to Mrs. Dummer how she ought to run my house for me!"
"How soon do you mean to have this table cleared?" asked Hilda.
The Christmas dinner, served by a raw girl in a large bluish-white pinafore, temporarily hired to assist Mrs. Dummer the housekeeper, had been a good one. Its only real fault was that it had had a little too much the air of being a special and mighty effort; and although it owed something to Hilda's parcels, Ingpen was justified in the self-satisfaction which he did not quite conceal as a bachelor host. But now, under Hilda's quizzing gaze, not merely the table but the room and the house sank to the tenth-rate. The coarse imperfections of the linen and the cutlery grew very apparent; the disorder of bottles and glasses and cups recalled the refectory of an inferior club. And the untidiness of the room, heaped with accumulations of newspapers, magazines, documents, books, boxes and musical-instrument cases, loudly accused the solitary despot whose daily caprices of arrangement were perpetuated and rendered sacred by the ukase that nothing was to be disturbed. Hilda's glinting eyes seemed to challenge each corner and dark place to confess its shameful dirt, and the malicious poise of her head mysteriously communicated the fact that in the past fortnight she had spied out every sinister secret in the whole graceless, primitive wigwam.
"This table," retorted Ingpen bravely, "is going to be cleared when it won't disturb me to have it cleared."
"All right," said Hilda. "But Mrs. Dummer does want to get on with her washing-up."
"Look here, madam," Ingpen replied. "You're a little ray of sunshine, and all that, and I'm the first to say so; but I'm not your husband." He made a warning gesture. "Now don't say you'd be sorry for any woman I was the husband of. Think of something more original." He burst out laughing.
Hilda went to the window and looked out at the fading day.
"Please, I only popped in to say it's nearly a quarter to three, and George and I will go down to the inn and bring the dog-cart up here. I want a little walk. We shan't get home till dark as it is."
"Oh! Chance it and stop for tea, and all will be forgiven."
"Drive home in the dark? Not much!" Edwin murmured.
"He's afraid of my driving," said Hilda.
When Edwin and Ingpen were alone together once more, Ingpen's expression changed back instantly to that which Hilda had disturbed, and Edwin's impatience, which had uneasily simmered during the interruption, began to boil.
"Her husband's in a lunatic asylum, I may tell you," said Ingpen.
"Whose?"
"The young woman's in question."
For Edwin, it was as if a door had opened in a wall and disclosed a vast unsuspected garden of romance.
"Really!"
"Yes, my boy," Ingpen went on, quietly, with restraint, but not without a naïve and healthy pride in the sudden display of the marvellous garden. "And I didn't meet her at a concert, or on the Grand Canal, or anything of that sort. I met her in a mill at Oldham while I was doing my job. He was the boss of the mill; I walked into an office and he was lying on the floor on the flat of his back, and she was wiping her feet on his chest. He was saying in a very anxious tone: 'You aren't half wiping them. Harder! Harder!' That was his little weakness, you see. He happened to be convinced that he was a doormat. She had been hiding the thing for weeks, coming with him to the works, and so on, to calm him." Ingpen spoke more quickly and excitedly: "I never saw a more awful thing in my life! I never saw a more awful thing in my life! And coming across it suddenly, you see… There was something absolutely odious in him lying down like that, and her trying to soothe him in the way he wanted. You should have seen the serious expression of his face, simply bursting with anxiety for her to wipe her boots properly on him. And her face when she caught sight of me. Oh! Dreadful! Dreadful!" Ingpen paused, and then continued calmly: "Of course I soon tumbled to it. For the matter of that, it didn't want much tumbling to. He went raving mad the same afternoon. And he's been more or less raving mad ever since."
"What a ghastly business… Any children?"
"No, thank God!" Ingpen answered with fresh emotion. "But don't you forget that she's still the wife of that lunatic, and he'll probably live for ever. She's tied up to him just as if she was tied up to a post. Those are our Divorce Laws! Isn't it appalling? Isn't it inconceivable? Just think of the situation of that woman!" Ingpen positively glared at Edwin in the intensity of his indignation.
"Awful!" Edwin murmured.
"Quite alone in the world, you know!" said Ingpen. "I'm hanged if I know what she'd have done without me. She hadn't a friend-at any rate she hadn't a friend with a grain of sense. Astonishing how solitary some couples are! … It aged her frightfully. She's much younger than she looks. Happily there was a bit of money-enough in fact."
Deeply as Edwin had been impressed by his romantic discovery of a woman in Ingpen's room at Hanbridge, he was still more impressed by it now. He saw the whole scene again, and saw it far more poetically. He accused himself of blindness, and also of a certain harshness of attitude towards the woman. He endowed her now with wondrous qualities. The adventure, in its tragicalness and its clandestine tenderness, was enchanting. How exquisite must be the relations between Ingpen and the woman if without warning she could go to his lair at night and wait confidently for his return! How divine the surprise for him, how ardent the welcome! He envied Ingpen. And also he admired him, for Ingpen had obviously conducted the affair with worthy expertise. And he had known how to win devotion.
With an air of impartiality Ingpen proceeded:
"You wouldn't see her quite at her best, I'm afraid. She's very shy-and naturally she'd be more shy than ever when you saw her. She's quite a different woman when the shyness has worn off. The first two or three times I met her I must say I didn't think she was anything more than a nice well-meaning creature, – you know what I mean. But she's much more than that. Can't play, but I believe she has a real feeling for music. She has time for reading, and she does read. And she has a more masculine understanding than nearly any other woman I've ever come across."
"You wait a bit!" thought Edwin. This simplicity on the part of a notable man of the world pleased him and gave him a comfortable sense of superiority.
Aloud he responded sympathetically:
"Good! … Do I understand she's living in the Five Towns now?"
"Yes," said Ingpen, after a hesitation. He spoke in a peculiar, significant voice, carefully modest. The single monosyllable conveyed to Edwin: "I cannot deny it. I was necessary to this woman, and in the end she followed me!"
Edwin was impressed anew by the full revelation of romance which had concealed itself in the squalid dailiness of the Five Towns.
"In fact," said Ingpen, "you never know your luck. If she'd been free I might have been fool enough to get married."
"Why do you say a thing like that?"
"Because I think I should be a fool to marry." Ingpen tapping his front teeth with his finger-nail, spoke reflectively, persuasively, and with calm detachment.
"Why?" asked Edwin, persuasively also, but nervously, as though the spirit of adventure in the search for truth was pushing him to fatal dangers.
"Marriage isn't worth the price-for me, that is. I daresay I'm peculiar." Ingpen said this quite seriously, prepared to consider impartially the proposition that he was peculiar. "The fact is, my boy, I think my freedom is worth a bit more than I could get out of any marriage."
"That's all very well," said Edwin, trying to speak with the same dispassionate conviction as Ingpen, and scarcely succeeding. "But look what you miss! Look how you live!" Almost involuntarily he glanced with self-complacence round the unlovely, unseemly room, and his glance seemed to penetrate ceilings and walls, and to discover and condemn the whole charmless house from top to bottom.
"Why? What's the matter with it?" Ingpen replied uneasily; a slight flush came into his cheeks. "Nobody has a more comfortable bed or more comfortable boots than I have. How many women can make coffee as good as mine? No woman ever born can make first-class tea. I have all I want."
"No, you don't. And what's the good of talking about coffee, and tea, and beds?"
"Well, what else is there I want that I haven't got? If you mean fancy cushions and draperies, no, thanks!"
"You know what I mean all right… And then 'freedom' as you say. What do you mean by freedom?"
"I don't specially mean," said Ingpen, tranquil and benevolent, "what I may call physical freedom. I'd give that up. I like a certain amount of untidiness, for instance, and I don't think an absence of dust is the greatest thing in the world; but I wouldn't in the least mind giving all that up. It wouldn't really matter to me. What I won't give up is my intellectual freedom. Perhaps I mean intellectual honesty. I'd give up even my intellectual freedom if I could be deprived of it fairly and honestly. But I shouldn't be. There's almost no intellectual honesty in marriage. There can't be. The entire affair is a series of compromises, chiefly base on the part of the man. The alternative is absolute subjection of the woman, which is offensive. No woman not absolutely a slave ever hears the truth except in anger. You can't say the same about men, and you know it. I'm not blaming; I'm stating. Even assuming a married man gets a few advantages that I miss, they're all purely physical-"
"Oh no! Not at all."
"My boy," Ingpen insisted, sitting up, and gazing earnestly at Edwin. "Analyse them down, and they're all physical-all! And I tell you I won't pay the price for them. I won't. I've no grievance against women; I can enjoy being with women as much as anybody, but I won't-I will not-live permanently on their level. That's why I say I might have been fool enough to get married. It's quite simple."
"Hm!"
Edwin, although indubitably one of those who had committed the vast folly of marriage, and therefore subject to Ingpen's indictment, felt not the least constraint, nor any need to offer an individual defence. Ingpen's demeanour seemed to have lifted the argument above the personal. His assumption that Edwin could not be offended was positively inspiring to Edwin. The fear of truth was exorcised. Freedom of thought existed in that room in England. Edwin reflected: "If he's right and I'm condemned accordingly, – well, I can't help it. Facts are facts, and they're extremely interesting."
He also reflected:
"Why on earth can't Hilda and I discuss like that?"
He did not know why, but he profoundly and sadly knew that such discussion would be quite impossible with Hilda.
The red-hot coals in the grate subsided together.
"And I'll tell you another thing-" Ingpen commenced.
He was stopped by the entrance of Mrs. Dummer, a fat woman, with an old japanned tray. Mrs. Dummer came in like a desperate forlorn hope. Her aged, grim, and yet somewhat hysterical face seemed to say: "I'm going to clear this table and get on with my work, even if I die for it at the hands of a brutal tyrant." Her gestures as she made a space for the tray and set it down on the table were the formidable gestures of the persecuted at bay.
"Mrs. Dummer," said Ingpen, in a weak voice, leaning back in his chair, "would you mind fetching me my tonic off my dressing-table? I've forgotten it."
"Bless us!" exclaimed Mrs. Dummer.
As she had hurried out, Ingpen winked placidly at Edwin in the room in which the shadows were already falling.
Nevertheless, when the dog-cart arrived at the front-door, Ingpen did seem to show some signs of exhaustion. Hilda would not get down. She sent word into the house by George that the departure must occur at once. Ingpen went out with Edwin, plaintively teased Hilda about the insufferable pride of those who sit in driving-seats, and took leave of her with the most punctilious and chivalrous ceremonial, while Hilda inscrutably smiling bent down to him with condescension from her perch.
"I'll sit behind going home, I think," said Edwin. "George, you can sit with your mother."
"Tchik! Tchik!" Hilda signalled.
The mare with a jerk started off down the misty and darkening road.
IV
The second and major catastrophe occurred very soon after the arrival in Trafalgar Road. It was three-quarters of an hour after sunset and the street lamps were lighted. Unchpin, with gloomy fatalism, shivered obscurely in the dark porch, waiting to drive the dog-cart down to the stable. Hilda had requested his presence; it was she also who had got him to bring the equipage up to the house in the morning. She had implied, but not asserted, that to harness the mare and trot up to Bleakridge was the work of a few minutes, and that a few minutes' light labour could make no real difference to Unchpin's Christmas Day. Edwin, descrying Unchpin in the porch, saw merely a defenceless man who had been robbed of the most sacred holiday of the year in order to gratify the selfish caprice of an overbearing woman. When asked how long he had been in the porch, Unchpin firmly answered that he had been there since three o'clock, the hour appointed by Mrs. Clayhanger. Edwin knew nothing of this appointment, and in it he saw more evidence of Hilda's thoughtless egotism. He perceived that he would be compelled to stop her from using his employees as her private servants, and that the prohibition would probably cause trouble. Hilda demanded curtly of Unchpin why he had not waited in the warm kitchen, according to instructions, instead of catching his death of cold in the porch. The reply was that he had rung and knocked fifteen times without getting a response.
At this Hilda became angry, not only with Emmie, the defaulting servant, but with the entire servant class and with the world. Emmie, the new cook, and temporarily the sole resident servant, was to have gone to Maggie's for her Christmas dinner, and to have returned at half past two without fail in order to light the drawing-room fire and prepare for tea-making. But, Maggie at the last moment having decided to go to Clara's for the middle of the day, Emmie was told to go with her and be as useful as she could at Mrs. Benbow's until a quarter past two.
"I hope you've got your latch-key, Edwin," said Hilda threateningly, as if ready to assume that with characteristic and inexcusable negligence he had left his latch-key at home.
"I have," he said drily, drawing the key from his pocket.
"Oh!" she muttered, as if saying: "Well, after all, you're no better than you ought to be." And took the key.
While she opened the door, Edwin surreptitiously gave half a crown to Unchpin, who was lighting the carriage-lamps.
George, with the marvellous self-preserving instinct of a small animal unprotected against irritated prowling monsters, had become invisible.
The front-doorway yawned black like the portal of a tomb. The place was a terrible negation of Christmas. Edwin felt for the radiator; it was as cold to the touch as a dead hand. He lit the hall-lamp, and the decorations of holly and mistletoe contrived by Hilda and George with smiles and laughter on Christmas Eve stood revealed as the very symbol of insincerity. Without taking off his hat and coat, he went into the unlighted glacial drawing-room, where Hilda was kneeling at the grate and striking matches. A fragment of newspaper blazed, and then the flame expired. The fire was badly laid.
"I'm sick of servants!" Hilda exclaimed with fury. "Sick! They're all alike!" Her tone furiously blamed Edwin and everybody.
And Edwin knew that the day was a pyramid of which this moment was the dreadful apex. At intervals during the drive home Hilda had talked confidentially to George of the wondrous things he and she could do if they only resided in the country-things connected with flowers, vegetables, cocks, hens, ducks, cows, rabbits, horses. She had sketched out the life of a mistress of Ladderedge Hall, and she had sketched it out for the benefit of the dull, hard man sitting behind. Her voice, so persuasive and caressing to George, had been charged with all sorts of accusations against the silent fellow whose back now and then collided with hers. She had exasperated him. She had wilfully and deliberately exasperated him… Her treatment of Unchpin, her childish outburst concerning servants, her acutely disagreeable demeanour, all combined now to exhaust the poor remainder of Edwin's patience. Not one word had been said about Ladderedge Hall, but Ladderedge Hall loomed always between them. Deadly war was imminent. Let it come! He would prefer war to a peace which meant for him nothing but insults and injustice. He would welcome war. He turned brusquely and lit the chandelier. On the table beneath it lay the writing-case that Hilda had given to George, and the edition of Matthew Arnold that she had given to Edwin, for a Christmas present. One of Edwin's Christmas presents to her, an ermine stole, she was wearing round her neck. Tragic absurdities, these false tokens of love… There they were, both of them in full street attire, she kneeling at the grate and he standing at the table, in the dank drawing-room which now had no resemblance to a home.
Edwin said with frigid and disdainful malevolence:
"I wish you could control yourself, Hilda. The fact that a servant's a bit late on Christmas Day is no reason for you to behave like a spoilt child. You're offensive."
