These Twain Part 30

That's your affair. But surely you aren't afraid of an idea! If you don't like the mere word, let's call it zenana. Call it the drawing-room and kitchen."

"So we're to be kept to our sphere!"

"Now don't be resentful. Naturally you're to be kept to your own sphere. If Edwin began dancing around in the kitchen, you'd soon begin to talk about _his_ sphere. You can't have the advantages of married life for nothing--neither you nor he. But some of you women nowadays seem to expect them gratis. Let me tell you, everything has to be paid for on this particular planet. I'm a bachelor. I've often thought about marrying, of course. I might get married some day. You never know your luck. If I do----"

"You'll keep your wife in the harem, no doubt! And she'll have to accept without daring to say a word all the risks you choose to take."

"There you are again!" he said. "This notion that marriage ought to be the end of risks for a woman is astonishingly rife, I find. Very curious! Very curious!" He seemed to address the wall. "Why, it's the beginning of them. Doesn't the husband take risks?"

"He chooses his own. He doesn't have business risks thrust upon him by his wife."

"Doesn't he? What about the risk of finding himself tied for life to an inefficient housekeeper? That's a bit of a business risk, isn't it?

I've known more than one man let in for it."

"And you've felt so sorry for him!"

"No, not specially. You must run risks. When you've finished running risks you're dead and you ought to be buried. If I was a wife I should enjoy running a risk with my husband. I swear I shouldn't want to shut myself up in a gla.s.s case with him out of all the draughts! Why, what are we all alive for?"

The idea of the fineness of running risks struck her as original. It challenged her courage, and she began to meditate.

"Yes," she murmured. "So you sleep at the office sometimes?"

"A certain elasticity in one's domestic arrangements." He waved a hand, seeming to pooh-pooh himself lightly. Then, quickly changing his mood, he bent and said good-night, but not quite with the saccharine artificiality of his first visit--rather with honest, friendly sincerity, in which were mingled both thanks and appreciation. Hilda jumped up responsively. And, the clarinet-case under his left arm, and the fiddle-case in his left hand, leaving the right arm free, Ingpen departed.

She did not immediately go to bed. Now that Ingpen was gone she perceived that though she had really said little in opposition to Edwin's scheme, he had at once a.s.sumed that she was a strong opponent of it. Hence she must have shown her feelings far too openly at the first mention of the affair before anybody had left. This annoyed her. Also the immense injustice of nearly all Ingpen's argument grew upon her moment by moment. She was conscious of a grudge against him, even while greatly liking him. But she swore that she would never show the grudge, and that he should never suspect it. To the end she would play a man's part in the man-to-man discussion. Moreover her anger against Edwin had not decreased. Nevertheless, a sort of zest, perhaps an angry joy, filled her with novel and intoxicating sensations. Let the scheme of the new works go forward! Let it fail! Let it ruin them! She would stand in the breach. She would show the whole world that no ordeal could lower her head. She had had enough of being the odalisque and the queen, reclining on the soft couch of security. Her nostrils scented life on the wind.... Then she heard a door close upstairs, and began at last rapidly, as it were cruelly, to put out the lights.

IX

The incubus and humiliations of a first-cla.s.s bilious attack are not eternal. Edwin had not retired very long before the malignant phase of the terrible malady pa.s.sed inevitably, by phenomena according with all clinical experience, into the next phase. And the patient, who from being chiefly a stomach, had now become chiefly a throbbing head, lay on his pillow exhausted but once more capable of objective thought. His resentment against his wife on account of her gratuitous disbelief in his business faculty, and on account of her interference in a matter that did not concern her, flickered up into new flame. He was absolutely innocent. She was absolutely guilty; no excuse existed or could be invented for her rude and wounding att.i.tude. He esteemed Tertius Ingpen, bachelor, the most fortunate of men.... Women--unjust, dishonourable, unintelligent, unscrupulous, giggling, pleasure-loving!

Their appet.i.te for pleasure was infantile and tigerish. He had noticed it growing in Hilda. Previous to marriage he had regarded Hilda as combining the best feminine with the best masculine qualities. In many ways she had exhibited the comforting straightforward characteristics of the male. But since marriage her mental resemblance to a man had diminished daily, and now she was the most feminine woman he had ever met, in the unsatisfactory sense of the word. Women ... Still, the behaviour of Janet and Hilda during the musical evening had been rather heroic. Impossible to dismiss them as being exclusively of the giggling race! They had decided to play a part, and they had played it with impressive fort.i.tude.... And the house of the Orgreaves--was it about to fall? He divined that it was about to fall. No death had so far occurred in the family, which had seemed to be immune through decades and forever. He wondered what would have happened to the house of Orgreave in six months' time.... Then he went back into the dark origins of his bilious attack.... And then he was at inexcusable Hilda again.

At length he heard her on the landing.

She entered the bedroom, and quickly he shut his eyes. He felt unpleasantly through his eyelids that she had turned up the gas. Then she was close to him, sat down on the edge of the bed. She asked him a question, calmly, as to occurrences since his retirement. He nodded an affirmative.

"Your forehead's all broken out," she said, moving away.

In a few moments he was aware of the delicious, soothing, heavenly application to his forehead of a handkerchief drenched in eau de cologne and water. The compress descended upon his forehead with the infinite gentleness of an endearment and the sudden solace of a reprieve. He made faint, inarticulate noises.

The light was extinguished for his ease.

He murmured weakly:

"Are you undressed already?"

"No," she said quietly. "I can undress all right in the dark."

He opened his eyes, and could dimly see her moving darkly about, brushing her hair, casting garments. Then she came towards him, a vague whiteness against the gloom, and, bending, felt for his face, and kissed him. She kissed him with superb and pa.s.sionate violence; she drew his life out of him, and poured in her own. The tremendous kiss seemed to prove that there is no difference between love and hate. It contained everything--surrender, defiance, anger and tenderness.

Neither of them spoke. The kiss dominated and a.s.suaged him. Its illogicalness overthrew him. He could never have kissed like that under such circ.u.mstances. It was a high and bold gesture. It expressed and transmitted confidence. She had explained nothing, justified nothing, made no charge, asked no forgiveness. She had just confronted him with one unarguable fact. And it was the only fact that mattered. His pessimism about marriage lifted. If his spirit was splendidly romantic enough to match hers, marriage remained a feasible state. And he threw away logic and the past, and in a magic vision saw that success in marriage was an affair of goodwill and the right tone. With the whole force of his heart he determined to succeed in marriage. And in the mighty resolve marriage presented itself to him as really rather easy after all.

CHAPTER X

THE ORGREAVE CALAMITY

I

On the following Sat.u.r.day afternoon--that is, six days later--Edwin had unusually been down to the shop after dinner, and he returned home about four o'clock. Ada, hearing his entrance, came into the hall and said:

"Please, sir, missis is over at Miss Orgreave's and will ye please go over?"

"Where's Master George?"

"In missis's own room, sir."

"All right."

The "mistress's own room" was the new nomenclature adopted by the kitchen, doubtless under suggestion, for the breakfast-room or boudoir.

Edwin opened the door and glanced in. George, apparently sketching, sat at his mother's desk, with the light falling over his right shoulder.

He looked up quickly in self-excuse:

"Mother said I could! Mother said I could!"

For the theory of the special sanct.i.ty of the boudoir had mysteriously established itself in the house during the previous eight or ten days.

George was well aware that even Edwin was not ent.i.tled to go in and out as he chose.

"Keep calm, sonny," said Edwin, teasing him.

With permissible and discreet curiosity he glanced from afar at the desk, its upper drawers and its pigeon-holes. Obviously it was very untidy. Its untidiness gave him sardonic pleasure, because Hilda was ever implying, or even stating, that she was a very tidy woman. He remembered that many years ago Janet had mentioned orderliness as a trait of the wonderful girl, Hilda Lessways. But he did not personally consider that she was tidy; a.s.suredly she by no means reached his standard of tidiness, which standard indeed she now and then dismissed as old-maidish. Also, he was sardonically amused by the air of importance and busyness which she put on when using the desk and the room; her household accounts, beheld at a distance, were his wicked joy.

He saw a bluish envelope lying untidily on the floor between the desk and the fireplace, and he picked it up. It had been addressed to "Mrs.

George Cannon, 59 Preston Street, Brighton," and readdressed in a woman's hand to "Mrs. Clayhanger, Trafalgar Road, Bursley." Whether the handwriting of the original address was masculine or feminine he could not decide. The envelope had probably contained only a bill or a circular. Nevertheless he felt at once inimically inquisitive towards the envelope. Without quite knowing it he was jealous of all Hilda's past life up to her marriage with him. After a moment, reflecting that she had made no mention of a letter, he dropped the envelope superciliously, and it floated to the ground.

"I'm going to Lane End House," he said.

"Can I come?"

"No."