These Twain Part 39

Nothing more! No genuine sign of regret! Edwin blamed her severely.

"Send George on an errand to Hanbridge!" That was Hilda all over! Why the devil should she go out of her way to make unpleasantness with Clara? She knew quite well what kind of a woman Clara was, and that the whole of Clara's existence was made up of domestic trifles, each of which was enormous for her.

"Will he be down to tea?" asked Clara.

"I doubt it."

"Well ... another day, then."

Clara, gathering her offspring, took leave at a door in the corridor which gave on to the yard. Mindful to the last of Mr. Ingpen's presence (which Hilda apparently now ignored), she smiled sweetly as she went.

But behind the smile, Edwin with regret, and Hilda with satisfaction, could perceive her everlasting grudge against their superior splendour.

Even had they sunk to indigence Clara could never have forgiven Edwin for having towards the end of their father's life prevented Albert from wheedling a thousand pounds out of old Darius, nor Hilda for her occasional p.r.i.c.king, unanswerable sarcasms.... Still, Rupert, descending two t.i.tanic steps into the yard, clung to his mother as to an angel.

"And _what_ errand to Hanbridge?" Edwin asked himself mistrustfully.

II

Scarcely a minute later, when Edwin, with Hilda and Ingpen, was back at the door of the machine-room, the office boy could be seen voyaging between roaring machines across the room towards his employer. The office boy made a sign of appeal, and Edwin answered with a curt sign that the office boy was to wait.

"What's that ye say?" Edwin yelled in Ingpen's ear.

Ingpen laughed, and made a trumpet with his hands:

"I was only wondering what your weekly running expenses are."

Even Ingpen was surprised and impressed by the scene, and Edwin was pleased now, after the flatness of Clara's inspection, that he had specially arranged for two of the machines to be running which strictly need not have been running that afternoon. He had planned a spectacular effect, and it had found a good public.

"Ah!" He hesitated, in reply to Ingpen. Then he saw Hilda's face, and his face showed confusion and he smiled awkwardly.

Hilda had caught Ingpen's question. She said nothing. Her expressive, sarcastic, unappeasable features seemed to say: "Running expenses!

Don't mention them. Can't you see they must be enormous? How can he possibly make this place pay? It's a gigantic folly--and what will be the end of it?"

After all, her secret att.i.tude towards the new enterprise was unchanged.

Arguments, facts, figures, persuasions, brutalities had been equally and totally ineffective. And Edwin thought:

"She is the bitterest enemy I have."

Said Ingpen:

"I like that girl up there on the top of that machine. And doesn't she just know where she is! What a movement of the arms, eh?"

Edwin nodded, appreciative, and then beckoned to the office boy.

"What is it?"

"Please, Sir, Mrs. 'Amps in the office to see you."

"All right," he bawled, casually. But in reality he was taken aback.

"It's Auntie Hamps now!" he said to the other two. "We shall soon have all Bursley here this afternoon."

Hilda raised her eyebrows.

"D'you know 'Auntie Hamps'?" she grimly asked Ingpen. Her voice, though she scarcely raised it, was plainer than the men's when they shouted.

As Ingpen shook his head, she added: "You ought to."

Edwin did not altogether care for this public ridicule of a member of the family. Auntie Hamps, though possibly a monster, had her qualities.

Hilda, a.s.suming the lead, beckoned with a lift of the head. And Edwin did not care for that either, on his works. Ingpen followed Hilda as though to a menagerie.

Auntie Hamps, in her black attire, which by virtue of its changeless style amounted to a historic uniform, was magnificent in the private office. The three found her standing in wait, tingling with vitality and importance and eagerness. She watched carefully that Edwin shut the door, and kept her eye not only on the door but also on the open window.

She received the presentation of Mr. Tertius Ingpen with grandeur and with high cordiality, and she could appreciate even better than Clara the polished fealty of his greeting.

"Sit down, Auntie."

"No, I won't sit down. I thought Clara was here. I told her I might come if I could spare a moment. I must say, Edwin"--she looked around the small office, and seemed to be looking round the whole works in a superb glance--"you make me proud of you. You make me proud to be your Auntie."

"Well," said Edwin, "you can be proud sitting down."

She smiled. "No, I won't sit down. I only just popped in to catch Clara. I was going to tea with her and the chicks." Then she lowered her voice: "I suppose you've heard about Mr. John Orgreave?" Her tone proved, however, that she supposed nothing of the kind.

"No. What about Johnnie?"

"He's run away with Mrs. Chris Hamson."

Her triumph was complete. It was perhaps one of her last triumphs, but it counted among the greatest of her career as a watchdog of society.

The thing was a major event, and the report was convincing. Useless to protest "Never!" "Surely not!" "It can't be true!" It carried truth on its face. Useless to demand sternly: "Who told you?" The news had reached Auntie Hamps through a curious channel--the stationmaster at Latchett. Heaven alone could say how Auntie Hamps came to have relations with the stationmaster at Latchett. But you might be sure that, if an elopement was to take place from Latchett station, Auntie Hamps would by an instinctive prescience have had relations with the station-master for twenty years previously. Latchett was the next station, without the least importance, to Shawport on the line to Crewe.

Johnnie Orgreave had got into the train at Shawport, and Mrs. Chris had joined it at Latchett, her house being near by. Once on the vast platforms of Crewe, the guilty couple would be safe from curiosity, lost in England, like needles in a haystack.

The Orgreave-Hamson flirtation had been afoot for over two years, but had only been seriously talked about for less than a year. Mrs. Chris did not "move" much in town circles. She was older than Johnnie, but she was one of your blonde, slim, unfruitful women, who under the shade of a suitable hat-brim are ageless. Mr. Chris was a heavy man, "glumpy"

as they say down there, a moneymaker in pots, and great on the colonial markets. He made journeys to America and to Australia. His Australian journey occupied usually about four months. He was now on his way back from Sydney, and nearly home. Mrs. Chris had not long since inherited a moderate fortune. It must have been the fortune, rendering them independent, that had decided the tragic immoralists to abandon all for love. The time of the abandonment was fixed for them by circ.u.mstance, for it had to occur before the husband's return.

Imagine the Orgreave business left in the hands of an incompetent irresponsible like Jimmie Orgreave! And then, what of that martyr, Janet? Janet and Johnnie had been keeping house together--a tiny house.

And Janet had had to "have an operation." Women, talking together, said exactly what the operation was, but the knowledge was not common. The phrase "have an operation" was enough in its dread. As a fact the operation, for calculus, was not very serious; it had perfectly succeeded, and Janet, whom Hilda had tenderly visited, was to emerge from the nursing home at Knype Vale within three days. Could not Johnnie and his Mrs. Chris have waited until she was re-established? No, for the husband was unpreventibly approaching, and romantic love must not be baulked. Nothing could or should withstand romantic love. Janet had not even been duly warned; Hilda had seen her that very morning, and a.s.suredly she knew nothing then. Perhaps Johnnie would write to her softly from some gay seaside resort where he and his leman were hiding their strong pa.s.sion. The episode was shocking; it was ruinous. The pair could never return. Even Johnnie alone would never dare to return.

"He was a friend of yours, was he not?" asked Auntie Hamps in bland sorrow of Tertius Ingpen.

He was a friend, and a close friend, of all three of them. And not only had he outraged their feelings--he had shamed them, irretrievably lowered their prestige. They could not look Auntie Hamps in the face.

But Auntie Hamps could look them in the face. And her glance, charged with grief and with satisfaction, said: "How are the mighty fallen, with their jaunty parade of irreligion, and their musical evenings on Sundays, with the windows open while folks are coming home from chapel!"

And there could be no retort.

"Another good man ruined by women!" observed Tertius Ingpen, with a sigh, stroking his beard.

Hilda sprang up; and all her pa.s.sionate sympathy for Janet, and her disappointment and disgust with Johnnie, the victim of desire, and her dissatisfaction with her husband and her hatred of Auntie Hamps, blazed forth and devastated the unwise Ingpen as she scathingly replied:

"Mr. Ingpen, that is a caddish thing to say!"

She despised convention; she was frankly and atrociously rude; and she did not care. Edwin blushed. Tertius Ingpen blushed.