Clayhanger

"Here's my handkerchief!" she cried, with pleasure. It was on the counter, a little white wisp in the grey-sheeted gloom. Stifford must have found it on the floor and picked it up.

The idea flashed through Edwin's head: "Did she leave her handkerchief on purpose, so that we should have to come back here?"

The only illumination of the shop was from three or four diamond-shaped holes in the upper part of as many shutters. No object was at first quite distinct. The corners were very dark. All merchandise not in drawers or on shelves was hidden in pale dust cloths. A chair wrong side up was on the fancy-counter, its back hanging over the front of the counter. Hilda had wandered behind the other counter, and Edwin was in the middle of the shop. Her face in the twilight had become more mysterious than ever. He was in a state of emotion, but he did not know to what category the emotion belonged. They were alone. Stifford had gone for the half-holiday. Darius, sickly, would certainly not come near. The printers were working as usual in their place, and the clanking whirr of a treadle-machine overhead agitated the ceiling. But n.o.body would enter the shop. His excitement increased, but did not define itself. There was a sudden roar in Duck Square, and then cries.

"What can that be?" Hilda asked, low.

"Some of the strikers," he answered, and went through the doors to the letter-hole in the central shutter, lifted the flap, and looked through.

A struggle was in progress at the entrance to the Duck Inn. One man was apparently drunk; others were jeering on the skirts of the lean crowd.

"It's some sort of a fight among them," said Edwin loudly, so that she could hear in the shop. But at the same instant he felt the wind of the door swinging behind him, and Hilda was silently at his elbow.

"Let me look," she said.

a.s.suredly her voice was trembling. He moved, as little as possible, and held the flap up for her. She bent and gazed. He could hear various noises in the Square, but she described nothing to him. After a long while she withdrew from the hole.

"A lot of them have gone into the public-house," she said. "The others seem to be moving away. There's a policeman. What a shame," she burst out pa.s.sionately, "that they have to drink to forget their trouble!"

She made no remark upon the strangeness of starving workmen being able to pay for beer sufficient to intoxicate themselves. Nor did she comment, as a woman, on the misery of the wives and children at home in the slums and the cheap cottage-rows. She merely compa.s.sionated the men in that

She stepped back into the shop.

"Do you know," she began, in a new tone, "you've quite altered my notion of poetry--what you said as we were going up to the station."

"Really!" He smiled nervously. He was very pleased. He would have been astounded by this speech from her, a professed devotee of poetry, if in those instants the capacity for astonishment had remained to him.

"Yes," she said, and continued, frowning and picking at her m.u.f.f: "But you do alter my notions, I don't know how it is... So this is your little office!"

The door of the cubicle was open.

"Yes, go in and have a look at it."

"Shall I?" She went in.

He followed her.

And no sooner was she in than she muttered, "I must hurry off now." Yet a moment before she seemed to have infinite leisure.

"Shall you be at Brighton long?" he demanded, and scarcely recognised his own accents.

"Oh! I can't tell! I've no idea. It depends."

"How soon shall you be down our way again?"

She only shook her head.

"I say--you know--" he protested.

"Good-bye," she said, quavering. "Thanks very much." She held out her hand.

"But--" He took her hand.

His suffering was intolerable. It was torture of the most exquisite kind. Her hand pressed his. Something snapped in him. His left hand hovered shaking over her shoulder, and then touched her shoulder, and he could feel her left hand on his arm. The embrace was clumsy in its instinctive and unskilled violence, but its clumsiness was redeemed by all his sincerity and all hers. His eyes were within six inches of her eyes, full of delicious shame, anxiety, and surrender. They kissed...

He had amorously kissed a woman. All his past life sank away, and he began a new life on the impetus of that supreme and final emotion. It was an emotion that in its freshness, agitating and divine, could never be renewed. He had felt the virgin answer of her lips on his. She had told him everything, she had yielded up her mystery, in a second of time. Her courage in responding to his caress ravished and amazed him.

She was so unaffected, so simple, so heroic. And the cool, delicate purity of those lips! And the faint feminine odour of her flesh and even of her stuffs! Dreams and visions were surpa.s.sed. He said to himself, in the flood-tide of masculinity--

"My G.o.d! She's mine."

And it seemed incredible.

FIVE.

She was sitting in the office chair; he on the desk. She said in a trembling voice--

"I should never have come to the Five Towns again, if you hadn't--"

"Why not?"

"I couldn't have stood it. I couldn't." She spoke almost bitterly, with a peculiar smile on her twitching lips.

To him it seemed that she had resumed her mystery, that he had only really known her for one instant, that he was bound to a woman entrancing, n.o.ble, but impenetrable. And this, in spite of the fact that he was close to her, touching her, tingling to her in the confined, crepuscular intimacy of the cubicle. He could trace every movement of her breast as she breathed, and yet she escaped the inward searching of his gaze. But he was happy. He was happy enough to repel all anxieties and inquietudes about the future. He was steeped in the bliss of the miracle. This was but the fourth day, and they were vowed.

"It was only Monday," he began.

"Monday!" she exclaimed. "I have thought of you for over a year." She leaned towards him. "Didn't you know? Of course you did!... You couldn't bear me at first."

He denied this, blus.h.i.+ng, but she insisted.

"You don't know how awful it was for me yesterday when you didn't come!"

he murmured.

"Was it?" she said, under her breath. "I had some very important letters to write." She clasped his hand.

There it was again! She spoke just like a man of business, immersed in secret schemes.

"It's awfully funny," he said. "I scarcely know anything about you, and yet--"

"I'm Janet's friend!" she answered. Perhaps it was the delicatest reproof of imagined distrust.

"And I don't want to," he went on. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-four," she answered sweetly, acknowledging his right to put such questions.

"I thought you were."

"I suppose you know I've got no relatives," she said, as if relenting from her att.i.tude of reproof. "Fortunately, father left just enough money for me to live on."