These Twain Part 26

"Oh, yes, I think so."

As the visitors were leaving, Hilda stopped Janet.

"Don't you think it'll be better if we have the piano put over there, and all the chairs together round here, Janet?"

"It might be," said Janet uncertainly.

Hilda turned sharply to Edwin:

"There! What did I tell you?"

"Well," he protested good-humouredly, "what on earth do you expect her to say, when you ask her like that? Anyhow I may announce definitely that I'm not going to have the piano moved. We'll try things as they are, for a start, and then see. Why, if you put all the chairs together over there, the place'll look like a blooming boarding-house."

The comparison was a failure in tact, which he at once recognised but could not retrieve. Hilda faintly reddened, and the memory of her struggles as manageress of a boarding-house was harshly revived in her.

"Some day I shall try the piano over there," she said, low.

And Edwin concurred, amiably:

"All right. Some day we'll try it together, just to see what it is like."

The girls, the younger ones still giggling, slipped elegantly out of the house, one after another.

Dinner pa.s.sed without incident.

V

The next day, Sunday, Edwin had a headache; and it was a bilious headache. Hence he insisted to himself and to everyone that it was not a bilious headache, but just one of those plain headaches which sometimes visit the righteous without cause or excuse; for he would never accept the theory that he had inherited his father's digestive weakness. A liability to colds he would admit, but not on any account a feeble stomach. Hence, further, he was obliged to pretend to eat as usual. George was rather gnat-like that morning, and Hilda was in a susceptible condition, doubtless due to nervousness occasioned by the novel responsibilities of the musical evening--and a Sabbath musical evening at that! After the one o'clock dinner, Edwin lay down on the sofa in the dining-room and read and slept; and when he woke up he felt better, and was sincerely almost persuaded that his headache had not been and was not a bilious headache. He said to himself that a short walk might disperse the headache entirely. He made one or two trifling adjustments in the disposition of the drawing-room furniture--his own disposition of it, and immensely and indubitably superior to that so pertinaciously advocated by Hilda--and then he went out. Neither Hilda nor George was visible. Possibly during his rest they had gone for a walk; they had fits of intimacy.

He walked in the faint September sunshine down Trafalgar Road into the town. Except for a few girls in dowdy finery and a few heavy youths with their black or dark-blue trousers turned up round the ankles far enough to show the white cotton lining, the street was empty. The devout at that hour were either dozing at home or engaged in Sunday school work; thousands of children were concentrated in the hot Sunday schools. As he pa.s.sed the Bethesda Chapel and School he heard the voices of children addressing the Lord of the Universe in laudatory and intercessory song. Near the Bethesda chapel, by the Duke of Cambridge Vaults, two men stood waiting, their faces firm in the sure knowledge that within three hours the public-houses would again be open. Thick smoke rose from the chimneys of several manufactories and thin smoke from the chimneys of many others. The scheme of a Sunday musical evening in that land presented itself to Edwin as something rash, fantastic, and hopeless,--and yet solacing. Were it known it could excite only hostility, horror, contempt, or an intense bovine indifference; chiefly the last.... Breathe the name of Chopin in that land!...

As he climbed Duck Bank he fumbled in his pocket for his private key of the shop, which he had brought with him; for, not the desire for fresh air, but an acute curiosity as to the answer to his letter to the solicitor to the Hall trustees making an offer for the land at Shawport, had sent him out of the house. Would the offer be accepted or declined, or would a somewhat higher sum be suggested? The reply would have been put into the post on Sat.u.r.day, and was doubtless then lying in the letter-box within the shop. The whole future seemed to be lying unopened in that letter-box.

He penetrated into his own shop like a thief, for it was not meet for an important tradesman to be seen dallying with business of a Sunday afternoon. As he went into the shutter-darkened interior he thought of Hilda, whom many years earlier he had kissed in that very same shutter-darkened interior one Thursday afternoon. Life appeared incredible to him, and in his wife he could see almost no trace of the girl he had kissed there in the obscure shop. There was a fair quant.i.ty of letters in the box. The first one he opened was from a solicitor; not the solicitor to the Hall trustees, but Tom Orgreave, who announced to Edwin Clayhanger, Esquire, dear sir, that his clients, the Palace Porcelain Company of Longshaw, felt compelled to call their creditors together. The Palace Porcelain Company, who had believed in the efficacy of printed advertising matter and expensive catalogues, owed Edwin a hundred and eighty pounds. It was a blow, and the more so in that it was unexpected. "Did I come messing down here on a Sunday afternoon to receive this sort of news?" he bitterly asked. A moment earlier he had not doubted the solvency of the Palace Porcelain Company; but now he felt that the Company wouldn't pay two shillings in the pound,--perhaps not even that, as there were debenture-holders. The next letter was an acceptance of his offer for the Shawport land. The die was cast, then. The new works would have to be created; lithography would increase; in the vast new enterprise he would be hampered by the purchase of Maggie's house; he had just made a bad debt; and he would have Hilda's capricious opposition to deal with. He quitted the shop abruptly, locked the door, and went back home, his mind very active but undirected.

VI

Something unfamiliar in the aspect of the breakfast-room as glimpsed through the open door from the hall, drew him within. Hilda had at last begun to make it into "her" room. She had brought an old writing-desk from upstairs and put it between the fireplace and the window. Edwin thought: "Doesn't she even know the light ought to fall over the left shoulder, not over the right?" Letter paper and envelopes and even stamps were visible; and a miscellaneous ma.s.s of letters and bills had been pushed into the s.p.a.ce between the flat of the desk and the small drawers about it. There was also an easy-chair, with a freshly-covered cushion on it; a new hearthrug that Edwin neither recognised nor approved of; several framed prints, and other oddments. His own portrait still dominated the mantelpiece, but it was now flanked by two bra.s.s candle-sticks. He thought: "If she'd ask me, I could have arranged it for her much better than that." Nevertheless the idea of her being absolute monarch of the little room, and expressing her individuality in it and by it, both pleased and touched him. Nor did he at all resent the fact that she had executed her plan in secret. She must have been anxious to get the room finished for the musical evening.

Thence he pa.s.sed into the drawing-room,--and was thunderstruck. The arrangement of the furniture was utterly changed, and the resemblance to a boarding-house parlour after all achieved. The piano had crossed the room; the chairs were ma.s.sed together in the most ridiculous way; the sofa was so placed as to be almost useless. His anger was furious but cold. The woman had considerable taste in certain directions, but she simply did not understand the art of fixing up a room. Whereas he did.

Each room in the house (save her poor little amateurish breakfast-room or "boudoir") had been arranged by himself, even to small details,--and well arranged. Everyone admitted that he had a talent for interiors.

The house was complete before she ever saw it, and he had been responsible for it. He was not the ordinary inexperienced ignorant husband who "leaves all that sort of thing to the missis." Interiors mattered to him; they influenced his daily happiness. The woman had clearly failed to appreciate the sacredness of the _status quo_. He appreciated it himself, and never altered anything without consulting her and definitely announcing his intention to alter. She probably didn't care a fig for the _status quo_. Her conduct was inexcusable.

It was an attack on vital principles. It was an outrage. Doubtless, in her scorn for the _status quo_, she imagined that he would accept the _fait accompli_. She was mistaken. With astounding energy he set to work to restore the _status quo ante_. The vigour with which he dragged and pushed an innocent elephantine piano was marvellous. In less than five minutes not a trace remained of the _fait accompli_. He thought: "This is a queer start for a musical evening!" But he was triumphant, resolute, and remorseless. He would show her a thing or two. In particular he would show that fair play had to be practised in his house. Then, perceiving that his hands were dirty, and one finger bleeding, he went majestically, if somewhat breathless, upstairs to the bathroom, and washed with care. In the gla.s.s he saw that, despite his exertions, he was pale. At length he descended, wondering where she was, where she had hidden herself, who had helped her to move the furniture, and what exactly the upshot would be. There could be no doubt that he was in a state of high emotion, in which unflinching obstinacy was shot through with qualms about disaster.

He revisited the drawing-room to survey his labours. She was there.

Whence she had sprung, he knew not. But she was there. He caught sight of her standing by the window before entering the room.

When he got into the room he saw that her emotional excitement far surpa.s.sed his own. Her lips and her hands were twitching; her nostrils dilated and contracted; tears were in her eyes.

"Edwin," she exclaimed very pa.s.sionately, in a thick voice, quite unlike her usual clear tones, as she surveyed the furniture, "this is really too much!"

Evidently she thought of nothing but her resentment. No consideration other than her outraged dignity would have affected her demeanour. If a whole regiment of their friends had been watching at the door, her demeanour would not have altered. The bedrock of her nature had been reached.

"It's war, this is!" thought Edwin.

He was afraid; he was even intimidated by her anger; but he did not lose his courage. The determination to fight for himself, and to see the thing through no matter what happened, was not a bit weakened. An inwardly feverish but outwardly calm vindictive desperation possessed him. He and she would soon know who was the stronger.

At the same time he said to himself:

"I was hasty. I ought not to have acted in such a hurry. Before doing anything I ought to have told her quietly that I intended to have the last word as regards furniture in this house. I was within my rights in acting at once, but it wasn't very clever of me, clumsy fool!"

Aloud he said, with a kind of self-conscious sn.i.g.g.e.r:

"What's too much?"

Hilda went on:

"You simply make me look a fool in my own house, before my own son and the servants."

"You've brought it on yourself," said he fiercely. "If you will do these idiotic things you must take the consequences. I told you I didn't want the furniture moved, and immediately my back's turned you go and move it. I won't have it, and so I tell you straight."

"You're a brute," she continued, not heeding him, obsessed by her own wound. "You're a brute!" She said it with terrifying conviction.

"Everybody knows it. Didn't Maggie warn me? You're a brute and a bully. And you do all you can to shame me in my own house. Who'd think I was supposed to be the mistress here? Even in front of my friends you insult me."

"Don't act like a baby. How do I insult you?"

"Talking about boarding-houses. Do you think Janet and all of them didn't notice it?"

"Well," he said. "Let this be a lesson to you."

She hid her face in her hands and sobbed, moving towards the door.

He thought:

"She's beaten. She knows she's got to take it."

Then he said:

"Do _I_ go altering furniture without consulting you? Do _I_ do things behind your back? Never!"

"That's no reason why you should try to make me look a fool in my own house. I told Ada how I wanted the furniture, and George and I helped her. And then a moment afterwards you give them contrary orders. What will they think of me? Naturally they'll think I'm not your wife, but your slave. You're a brute." Her voice rose.