Bennett Arnold
These Twain
"Amy 'udn't play with me," he murmured.
"Wouldn't she? Naughty Amy!"
"Mammy tired too," he glanced upwards at his mother's eyes in sympathy.
And immediately he was asleep. Clara kissed him, bending her head down and with difficulty reaching his cheek with her lips.
Auntie Hamps enquired fondly:
"What does he mean-'mother tired too'?"
"Well," said Clara, "the fact is some of 'em were so excited they stopped my afternoon sleep this afternoon. I always do have my nap, you know," – she looked at Hilda. "In here! When this door's closed they know mother mustn't be disturbed. Only this afternoon Lucy or Amy-I don't know which, and I didn't enquire too closely-forgot… He's remembered it, the little Turk."
"Is he asleep?" Hilda demanded in a low voice.
"Fast. He's been like that lately. He'll play a bit, and then he'll stop, and say he's tired, and sometimes cry, and he'll come to me and be asleep in two jiffs. I think he's been a bit run down. He said he had toothache yesterday. It was nothing but a little cold; they've all had colds; but I wrapped his face up to please him. He looked so sweet in his bandage, I assure you I didn't want to take it off again. No, I didn't… I wonder why Amy wouldn't play with him? She's such a splendid playmate-when she likes. Full of imagination! Simply full of it!"
Albert had approached from the window.
With an air of important conviction, he said to Hilda:
"Yes, Amy's imagination is really remarkable." As no one responded to this statement, he drummed on the table to ease the silence, and then suddenly added: "Well, I suppose I must be getting on with my dictionary reading! I'm only at S; and there's bound to be a lot of words under U-beginning with un, you know. I saw at once there would be." He spoke rather defiantly, as though challenging public opinion to condemn his new dubious activity.
"Oh!" said Clara. "Albert's quite taken up with missing words nowadays."
But instead of conning his dictionary, Albert returned to the window, drawn by his inexhaustible paternal curiosity, and he even opened the window and leaned out, so that he might more effectively watch the garden. And with the fresh air there entered the high, gay, inspiriting voices of the children.
Clara smiled down at the boy sleeping in her lap. She was happy. The child was happy. His flushed face, with its expression of loving innocence, was exquisitely touching. Clara's face was full of proud tenderness. Everybody gazed at the picture with secret and profound pleasure. Hilda wished once more that George was only two and a half years old again. George's infancy, and her early motherhood, had been very different from all this. She had never been able to shut a dining-room door, or any other door, as a sign that she must not be disturbed. And certainly George had never sympathetically remarked that she was tired… She was envious… And yet a minute ago she had been execrating the family life of the Benbows. The complexity of the tissue of existence was puzzling.
V
When Albert brought his head once more into the room he suddenly discovered the stuffiness of the atmosphere, and with the large, free gestures of a mountaineer and a sanitarian threw open both windows as wide as possible. The bleak wind from the moorlands surged in, fluttering curtains, and lowering the temperature at a run.
"Won't Rupert catch cold?" Hilda suggested, chilled.
"He's got to be hardened, Rupert has!" Albert replied easily. "Fresh air! Nothing like it! Does 'em good to feel it!"
Hilda thought:
"Pity you didn't think so a bit earlier!"
Her countenance was too expressive. Albert divined some ironic thought in her brain, and turned on her with a sort of parrying jeer:
"And how's the great man getting along?"
In this phrase, which both he and Clara employed with increasing frequency, Albert let out not only his jealousy of, but his respect for, the head of the family. Hilda did not like it, but it flattered her on Edwin's behalf, and she never showed her resentment of the attitude which prompted it.
"Edwin? Oh, he's all right. He's working." She put a slight emphasis on the last pronoun, in order revengefully to contrast Edwin's industry with Albert's presence during business hours at a children's birthday party. "He said to me as he went out that he must go and earn something towards Maggie's rent." She laughed softly.
Clara smiled cautiously; Maggie smiled and blushed a little; Albert did not commit himself; only Auntie Hamps laughed without reserve.
"Edwin will have his joke," said she.
Although Hilda had audaciously gone forth that afternoon with the express intention of opening negotiations, on her own initiative, with Maggie for the purchase of the house, she had certainly not meant to discuss the matter in the presence of the entire family. But she was seized by one of her characteristic impulses, and she gave herself up to it with the usual mixture of glee and apprehension. She said:
"I suppose you wouldn't care to sell us the house, would you, Maggie?"
Everybody became alert, and as it grew apparent that the company was assisting at the actual birth of a family episode or incident, a peculiar feeling of eager pleasure spread through the room, and the appetite for history-making leapt up.
"Indeed I should!" Maggie answered, with a deepening flush, and all were astonished at her decisiveness, and at the warmth of her tone. "I never wanted the house. Only it was arranged that I should have it, so of course I took it." The long-silent victim was speaking. Money was useless to her, for she was incapable of turning it into happiness; but she had her views on finance and property, nevertheless; and though in all such matters she did as she was told, submissively accepting the decisions of brother or brother-in-law as decrees of fate, yet she was quite aware of the victimhood. The assemblage was surprised and even a little intimidated by her mild outburst.
"But you've got a very good tenant, Maggie," said Auntie Hamps enthusiastically.
"She's got a very good tenant, admitted!" Albert said judicially and almost sternly. "But she'd never have any difficulty in finding a very good tenant for that house. That's not the point. The point is that the investment really isn't remunerative. Maggie could do much better for herself than that. Very much better. Why, if she went the right way about it she could get ten per cent on her money! I know of things… And I bet she doesn't get three and a half per cent clear from the house. Not three and a half." He glanced reproachfully at Hilda.
"Do you mean the rent's too low?" Hilda questioned boldly.
He hesitated, losing courage.
"I don't say it's too low. But Maggie perhaps took the house over at too big a figure."
Maggie looked up at her brother-in-law.
"And whose fault was that?" she asked sharply. The general surprise was intensified. No one could understand Maggie. No one had the wit to perceive that she had been truly annoyed by Auntie Hamps's negligence in regard to jam, and was momentarily capable of bitterness. "Whose fault was that?" she repeated. "You and Clara and Edwin settled it between you. You yourself said over and over again it was a fair figure."
"I thought so at the time! I thought so at the time!" said Albert quickly. "We all acted for the best."
"I'm sure you did," murmured Auntie Hamps.
"I should think so, indeed!" murmured Clara, seeking to disguise her constraint by attentions to the sleeping Rupert.
"Is Edwin thinking of buying, then?" Albert asked Hilda in a quiet, studiously careless voice.
"We've discussed it," responded Hilda.
"Because if he is, he ought to take it over at the price Mag took it at. She oughtn't to lose on it. That's only fair."
"I'm sure Edwin would never do anything unfair," said Auntie Hamps.
Hilda made no reply. She had already heard the argument from Edwin, and Albert now seemed to her more tedious and unprincipled than usual. Her reason admitted the force of the argument as regards Maggie, but instinct opposed it.
Nevertheless she was conscious of sudden sympathy for Maggie, and of a weakening of her prejudice against her.
"Hadn't we better be going, Auntie?" Maggie curtly and reproachfully suggested. "You know quite well that jam stands a good chance of being ruined."
"I suppose we had," Auntie Hamps concurred with a sigh, and rose.
"I shall be able to carry out my plan," thought Hilda, full of wisdom and triumph. And she saw Edwin, owner of the house, with his wild lithographic project scotched. And the realisation of her own sagacity thus exercised on behalf of those she loved, made her glad.
At the same moment, just as Albert was recommencing his flow, the door opened and Edwin entered. He had glimpsed the children in the garden and had come into the house by the back way. There were cries of stupefaction and bliss. Both Albert and Clara were unmistakably startled and flattered. Indeed, several seconds elapsed before Albert could assume the proper grim, casual air. Auntie Hamps rejoiced and sat down again. Maggie disclosed no feeling, and she would not sit down again. Hilda had a serious qualm. She was obliged to persuade herself that in opening the negotiations for the house she had not committed an enormity. She felt less sagacious and less dominant. Who could have dreamt that Edwin would pop in just then? It was notorious, it was even a subject of complaint, that he never popped in. In reply to enquiries he stammered in his customary hesitating way that he happened to be in the neighbourhood on business and that it had occurred to him, etc., etc. In short, there he was.
"Aren't you coming, Auntie?" Maggie demanded.
"Let me have a look at Edwin, child," said Auntie Hamps, somewhat nettled. "How set you are!"
"Then I shall go alone," said Maggie.
"Yes. But what about this house business?" Albert tried to stop her.
He could not stop her. Finance, houses, rents, were not real to her. She owned but did not possess such things. But the endangered jam was real to her. She did not own it, but she possessed it. She departed.
"What's amiss with her to-day?" murmured Mrs. Hamps. "I must go too, or I shall be catching it; my word I shall!"
"What house business?" Edwin asked.
"Well," said Albert. "I like that! Aren't you trying to buy her house from her? We've just been talking it over."
Edwin glanced swiftly at Hilda, and Hilda knew from the peculiar constrained, almost shamefaced, expression on his features, that he was extremely annoyed. He gave a little nervous laugh.
"Oh! Have ye?" he muttered.
VI
Although Edwin discussed the purchase of the house quite calmly with Albert, and appeared to regard it as an affair practically settled, Hilda could perceive from a single gesture of his in the lobby as they were leaving, that his resentment against herself had not been diminished by the smooth course of talking. Nevertheless she was considerably startled by his outburst in the street.
"It's a pity Maggie went off like that," she said quietly. "You might have fixed everything up immediately."
Then it was that he turned on her, glowering angrily.
"Why on earth did you go talking about it, without telling me first?" he demanded, furious.
"But it was understood, dear-" She smiled, affecting not to perceive his temper, and thereby aggravating it.
He almost shouted:
"Nothing of the kind! Nothing of the kind!"
"Maggie was there. I just happened to mention it." Hilda was still quite placid.
"You went down on purpose to tell her, so you needn't deny it. Do you take me for a fool?"
Her placidity was undiminished.
"Of course I don't take you for a fool, dear. I assure you I hadn't the slightest idea you'd be annoyed."
"Yes, you had. I could see it on your face when I came in. Don't try to stuff me up. You go blundering into a thing, without the least notion-without the least notion! I've told you before, and I tell you again-I won't have you interfering in my business affairs. You know nothing of business. You'll make my life impossible. All you women are the same. You will poke your noses in. There'll have to be a clear understanding between you and me on one or two points, before we go much further."
"But you told me I could mention it to her."
"No, I didn't."
"You did, Edwin. Do be just."
"I didn't say you could go and plunge right into it at once. These things have to be thought out. Houses aren't bought like that. A house isn't a pound of tea, and it isn't a hat."
"I'm very sorry."
"No, you aren't. And you know jolly well you aren't. Your scheme was simply to tie my hands."
She knew the truth of this, and her smile became queer. Nevertheless the amiable calm which she maintained astonished even herself. She was not happy, but certainly she was not unhappy. She had got, or she was going to get, what she wanted; and here was the only fact important to her; the means by which she had got it, or was going to get it, were negligible now. It cost her very little to be magnanimous. She wondered at Edwin. Was this furious brute the timid, worshipping boy who had so marvellously kissed her a dozen years earlier-before she had fallen into the hands of a scoundrel? Were these scenes what the exquisite romance of marriage had come to? … Well, and if it was so, what then? If she was not happy she was elated, and she was philosophic, and she had the terrific sense of realities of some of her sex. She was out of the Benbow house; she breathed free, she had triumphed, and she had her man to herself. He might be a brute-the Five Towns (she had noticed as a returned exile) were full of brutes whose passions surged and boiled beneath the phlegmatic surface-but he existed, and their love existed. And a peep into the depth of the cauldron was exciting… The injustice or the justice of his behaviour did not make a live question.
Moreover, she did not in truth seriously regard him as a brute. She regarded him as an unreasonable creature, something like a baby, to be humoured in the inessentials of a matter of which the essentials were now definitely in her favour. His taunt that she went blundering into a thing, and that she knew naught of business, amused her. She knew her own business, and knew it profoundly. The actual situation was a proof of that. As for abstract principles of business, the conventions and etiquette of it-her lips condescendingly curled. After all, what had she done to merit this fury? Nothing! Nothing! What could it matter whether the negotiations were begun instantly or in a week's or a month's time? (Edwin would have dilly-dallied probably for three months, or six). She had merely said a few harmless words, offered a suggestion. And now he desired to tear her limb from limb and eat her alive. It was comical! Impossible for her to be angry, in her triumph! It was too comical! She had married an astounding personage… But she had married him. He was hers. She exulted in the possession of him. His absurd peculiarities did not lower him in her esteem. She had a perfect appreciation of his points, including his general wisdom. But she was convinced that she had a special and different and superior kind of wisdom.
"And a nice thing you've let Maggie in for!" Edwin broke out afresh after a spell of silent walking.
"Let Maggie in for?" she exclaimed lightly.
"Albert ought never to have known anything of it until it was all settled. He will be yarning away to her about how he can use her money for her, and what he gets hold of she'll never see again, – you may bet your boots on that. If you'd left it to me I could have fixed things up for her in advance. But no! In you must go! Up to the neck! And ruin everything!"
"Oh!" she said reassuringly. "You'll be able to look after Maggie all right."
He sniffed, and settled down into embittered disgust, quickening somewhat his speed up the slope of Acre Lane.
"Please don't walk so fast, Edwin," she breathed, just like a nice little girl. "I can't keep up with you."
In spite of his enormous anger he could not refuse such a request. She was getting the better of him again. He knew it; he could see through the devices. With an irritated swing of his body he slowed down to suit her.
She had a glimpse of his set, gloomy, savage, ruthless face, the lower lip bulging out. Really it was grotesque! Were they grown up, he and she? She smiled almost self-consciously, fearing that passers-by might notice his preposterous condition. All the way up Acre Lane and across by St. Luke's Churchyard into Trafalgar Road they walked thus side by side in silence. By strange good luck they did not meet a single acquaintance, and as Edwin had a latchkey, no servant had to come and open the door and behold them.
Edwin, throwing his hat on the stand, ran immediately upstairs. Hilda passed idly into the drawing-room. She was glad to be in her own drawing-room again. It was a distinguished apartment, after Clara's. There lay the Dvorak music on the piano… The atmosphere seemed full of ozone. She rang for Ada and spoke to her with charming friendliness about Master George. Master George had returned from an informal cricket match in the Manor Fields, and was in the garden. Yes, Ada had seen to his school-clothes. Everything was in order for the new term shortly to commence. But Master George had received a blow from the cricket-ball on his shin, which was black and blue… Had Ada done anything to the shin? No, Master George would not let her touch it, but she had been allowed to see it… Very well, Ada… There was something beatific about the state of being mistress of a house. Without the mistress, the house would simply crumble to pieces.
Hilda went upstairs; she was apprehensive, but her apprehensiveness was agreeable to her… No, Edwin was not in the bedroom… She could hear him in the bathroom. She tried the door. It was bolted. He always bolted it.
"Edwin!"
"What is it?"
He opened the door. He was in his shirt sleeves and had just finished with the towel. She entered, and shut the door and bolted it. And then she began to kiss him. She kissed him time after time, on his cheek so damp and fresh.
"Poor dear!" she murmured.
She knew that he could not altogether resist those repeated kisses. They were more effective than the best arguments or the most graceful articulate surrenders. Thus she completed her triumph. But whether the virtue of the kisses lay in their sensuousness or in their sentiment, neither he nor she knew. And she did not care… She did not kiss him with abandonment. There was a reserve in her kisses, and in her smile. Indeed she went on kissing him rather sternly. Her glance, when their eyes were very close together, was curious. It seemed to imply: "We are in love. And we love. I am yours. You are mine. Life is very fine after all. I am a happy woman. But still-each is for himself in this world, and that's the bedrock of marriage as of all other institutions." Her sense of realities again! And she went on kissing, irresistibly.
"Kiss me."
And he had to kiss her.
Whereupon she softened to him, and abandoned herself to the emanations of his charm, and her lips became almost liquid as she kissed him again; nevertheless there was still a slight reserve in her kisses.
At tea she chattered like a magpie, as the saying is. Between her and George there seemed to be a secret instinctive understanding that Edwin had to be humoured, enlivened, drawn into talk, – for although he had kissed her, his mood was yet by no means restored to the normal. He would have liked to remain, majestic, within the tent of his soul. But they were too clever for him. Then, to achieve his discomfiture, entered Johnnie Orgreave, with a suggestion that they should all four-Edwin, Hilda, Janet, and himself-go to the theatre at Hanbridge that night. Hilda accepted the idea instantly. Since her marriage, her appetite for pleasure had developed enormously. At moments she was positively greedy for pleasure. She was incapable of being bored at the theatre, she would sooner be in the theatre of a night than out of it.
"Oh! Do let's go!" she cried.
Edwin did not want to go, but he had to concur. He did not want to be pleasant to Johnnie Orgreave or to anybody, but he had to be pleasant.
"Be on the first car that goes up after seven fifteen," said Johnnie as he was departing.
Edwin grunted.
"You understand, Teddy? The first car that goes up after seven fifteen."
"All right! All right!"
Blithely Hilda went to beautify herself. And when she had beautified herself and made herself into a queen of whom the haughtiest master-printer might be proud, she despatched Ada for Master George. And Master George had to come to her bedroom.
"Let me look at that leg," she said. "Sit down."
Devious creature! During tea she had not even divulged that she had heard of the damaged shin. Master George was taken by surprise. He sat down. She knelt, and herself unloosed the stocking and exposed the little calf. The place was black and blue, but it had a healthy look.
"It's nothing," she said.
And then, all in her splendid finery, she kissed the dirty discoloured shin. Strange! He was only two years old and just learning to talk.
"Now then, missis! Here's the tram!" Edwin yelled out loudly, roughly, from below. He would have given a sovereign to see her miss the car, but his inconvenient sense of justice forced him to warn her.
"Coming! Coming!"
She kissed Master George on the mouth eagerly, and George seemed, unusually, to return the eagerness. She ran down the darkening stairs, ecstatic.
In the dusky road, Edwin curtly signalled to the vast ascending steam-car, and it stopped. Those were in the old days, when people did what they liked with the cars, stopping them here and stopping them there according to their fancy. The era of electricity and fixed stopping-places, and soulless, conscienceless control from London had not set in. Edwin and Hilda mounted. Two hundred yards further on the steam-tram was once more arrested, and Johnnie and Janet joined them. Hilda was in the highest spirits. The great affair of the afternoon had not been a quarrel, but an animating experience which, though dangerous, intensified her self-confidence and her zest.