all those hills!”
“Pooh! Excellent for the muscles of the calf.”
“Do you live alone, Mr. Ingpen?”
“I have a sort of housekeeper.”
“In a cottage?”
“In a cottage.”
“But what do you do—all alone?”
“I cultivate myself.”
And Hilda, in a changed tone, said:
“How wise you are!”
“Rather inconvenient, being out there, isn’t it?” Edwin suggested.
“It may be inconvenient sometimes for my job. But I can’t help that. I give the State what I consider fair value for the money it pays me, and not a grain more. I’ve got myself to think about. There are some things I won’t do, and one of them is to live all the time in a vile hole like the Five Towns. I won’t do it. I’d sooner be a blooming peasant on the land.”
As he was a native he had the right to criticise the district without protest from other natives.
“You’re quite right as to the vile hole,” said Hilda with conviction.
“I don’t know——” Edwin muttered. “I think old Bosley isn’t so bad.”
“Yes. But you’re an old stick-inthe-mud, dearest,” said Hilda. “Mr. Ingpen has lived away from the district, and so have I. You haven’t. You’re no judge. We know, don’t we, Mr. Ingpen?”
When, Ingpen having at last accumulated sufficient resolution to move and get his cap, they went through the drawing-room to the garden, they found that rain was falling.
“Never mind!” said Ingpen, lifting his head sardonically in a mute indictment of the heavens. “I have my mack.”
Edwin searched out the bicycle and brought it to the window, and Hilda stuck a hat on his head. Leisurely Ingpen clipped his trousers at the ankle, and unstrapped a mackintosh cape from the machine, and folded the strap. Leisurely he put on the cape, and gazed at the impenetrable heavens again.
“I can make you up a bed, Mr. Ingpen.”
“No, thanks. Oh, no, thanks! The fact is, I rather like rain.”
Leisurely he took a box of fusees from his pocket, and lighted his lamp, examining it as though it contained some hidden and perilous defect. Then he pressed the tyres.
“The back tyre’ll do with a little more air,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t know if my pump will work.”
It did work, but slowly. After which, gloves had to be assumed.
“I suppose I can get out this way. Oh! My music! Never mind, I’ll leave it.”
Then with a sudden access of ceremoniousness he bade adieu to Hilda; no detail of punctilio was omitted from the formality.
“Good-bye. Many thanks.”
“Good-bye. Thank you!”
Edwin preceded the bicyclist and the bicycle round the side of the house to the front-gate at the corner of Hulton Street and Trafalgar Road.
In the solemn and chill nocturnal solitude of rain-swept Hulton Street, Ingpen straddled the bicycle, with his left foot on one raised pedal and the other on the pavement; and then held out a gloved hand to Edwin.
“Good-bye, old chap. See you soon.”
Much good-will and appreciation and hope was implicit in that rather casual handshake.
He sheered off strongly down the dark slope of Hulton Street in the rain, using his ankles with skill in the pedal-stroke. The man’s calves seemed to be enormously developed. The cape ballooned out behind his swiftness, and in a moment he had swerved round the flickering mournful gas-lamp at the bottom of the mean new street and was gone.
Chapter VI
Husband and Wife
i
“I’m upstairs,” Hilda called in a powerful whisper from the head of the stairs as soon as Edwin had closed and bolted the front-door.
He responded humorously. He felt very happy, lusty, and wideawake. The evening had had its contretemps, its varying curve of success, but as a whole it was a triumph. And, above all, it was over,—a thing that had had to be accomplished and that had been accomplished, with dignity and effectiveness. He walked in ease from room to lighted empty room, and the splendid waste of gas pleased him, arousing something royal that is at the bottom of generous natures. In the breakfast-room especially the gas had been flaring to no purpose for hours. “Her room, her very own room!” He wondered indulgently when, if ever, she would really make it her own room by impressing her individuality upon it. He knew she was always meaning to do something drastic to the room, but so far she had got no further than his portrait. Child! Infant! Wayward girl! ... Still the fact of the portrait on the mantelpiece touched him.
He dwelt tenderly on the invisible image of the woman upstairs. It was marvellous how she was not the Hilda he had married. The new Hilda had so overlaid and hidden the old, that he had positively to make an effort to recall what the old one was, with her sternness and her anxious air of responsibility. But at the same time she was the old Hilda too. He desired to be splendidly generous, to environ her with all luxuries, to lift her clear above other women; he desired the means to be senselessly extravagant for her. To clasp on her arm a bracelet whose cost would keep a workingman’s family for three years would have delighted him. And though he was interested in social schemes, and had a social conscience, he would sooner have bought that bracelet, and so purchased the momentary thrill of putting it on her capricious arm, than have helped to ameliorate the lot of thousands of victimised human beings. He had Hilda in his bones and he knew it, and he knew that it was a grand and a painful thing.
Nevertheless he was not without a considerable self-satisfaction, for he had done very well by Hilda. He had found her at the mercy of the world, and now she was safe and sheltered and beloved, and made mistress of a house and home that would stand comparison with most houses and homes. He was proud of his house; he always watched over it; he was always improving it; and he would improve it more and more; and it should never be quite finished.
The disorder in it, now, irked him. He walked to and fro, and restored every piece of furniture to its proper place, heaped the contents of the ash-trays into one large ash-tray, covered some of the food, and locked up the alcohol. He did this leisurely, while thinking of the woman upstairs, and while eating two chocolates,—not more, because he had notions about his stomach. Then he shut and bolted the drawing-room window, and opened the door leading to the cellar steps and sniffed, so as to be quite certain that the radiator furnace was not setting the house on fire. And then he extinguished the lights, and the hall-light
