Hilda Lessways - Arnold Bennett
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HILDA LESSWAYS
BY ARNOLD BENNETT
1911
CONTENTS
BOOK I
HER START IN LIFE
I AN EVENT IN MR. SKELLORN'S LIFE
II THE END OF THE SCENE
III MR. CANNON
IV DOMESTICITY INVADED
V MRS. LESSWAYS' SHREWDNESS
VI VICTOR HUGO AND ISAAC PITMAN
VII THE EDITORIAL SECRETARY
VIII JANET ORGREAVE
IX IN THE STREET
X MISS GAILEY IN DECLENSION
XI DISILLUSION
XII THE TELEGRAM
XIII HILDA'S WORLD
XIV TO LONDON
BOOK II
HER RECOVERY
I SIN
II THE LITTLE ROOM
III JOURNEY TO BLEAKRIDGE
IV WITH THE ORGREAVES
V EDWIN CLAYHANGER
VI IN THE GARDEN
VII THE NEXT MEETING
BOOK III
HER BURDEN
I HILDA INDISPENSABLE
II SARAH'S BENEFACTOR
III AT BRIGHTON
IV THE SEA
BOOK IV
HER FALL
I THE GOING CONCERN
II THE UNKNOWN ADVENTURE
III FLORRIE AGAIN
BOOK V
HER DELIVERANCE
I LOUISA UNCONTROLLED
II SOME SECRET HISTORY
BOOK VI
HER PUNISHMENT
I EVENING AT BLEAKRIDGE
II A RENDEZVOUS
III AT THE WORKS
IV THE CALL FROM BRIGHTON
V THURSDAY AFTERNOON
VI MISCHANCE
* * * * *
BOOK I
HER START IN LIFE
CHAPTER I
AN EVENT IN MR. SKELLORN'S LIFE
I
The Lessways household, consisting of Hilda and her widowed mother, was
temporarily without a servant. Hilda hated domestic work, and because
she hated it she often did it passionately and thoroughly. That
afternoon, as she emerged from the kitchen, her dark, defiant face was
full of grim satisfaction in the fact that she had left a kitchen
polished and irreproachable, a kitchen without the slightest indication
that it ever had been or ever would be used for preparing human nature's
daily food; a show kitchen. Even the apron which she had worn was hung
in concealment behind the scullery door. The lobby clock, which stood
over six feet high and had to be wound up every night by hauling on a
rope, was noisily getting ready to strike two. But for Mrs. Lessways'
disorderly and undesired assistance, Hilda's task might have been
finished a quarter of an hour earlier. She passed quietly up the stairs.
When she was near the top, her mother's voice, at once querulous and
amiable, came from the sitting-room:
"Where are you going to?"
There was a pause, dramatic for both of them, and in that minute pause
the very life of the house seemed for an instant to be suspended, and
then the waves of the hostile love that united these two women resumed
their beating, and Hilda's lips hardened.
"Upstairs," she answered callously.
No reply from the sitting-room!
At two o'clock on the last Wednesday of every month, old Mr. Skellorn,
employed by Mrs. Lessways to collect her cottage-rents, called with a
statement of account, and cash in a linen bag. He was now due. During
his previous visit Hilda had sought to instil some common sense into her
mother on the subject of repairs, and there had ensued an altercation
which had never been settled.
"If I stayed down, she wouldn't like it," Hilda complained fiercely
within herself, "and if I keep away she doesn't like that either! That's
mother all over!"
She went to her bedroom. And into the soft, controlled shutting of the
door she put more exasperated vehemence than would have sufficed to bang
it off its hinges.
II
At this date, late October in 1878, Hilda was within a few weeks of
twenty-one. She was a woman, but she could not realize that she was a
woman. She remembered that when she first went to school, at the age of
eight, an assistant teacher aged nineteen had seemed to her to be
unquestionably and absolutely a woman, had seemed to belong definitely
to a previous generation. The years had passed, and Hilda was now older
than that mature woman was then; and yet she could not feel adult,
though her childhood gleamed dimly afar off, and though the intervening
expanse of ten years stretched out like a hundred years, like eternity.
She was in trouble; the trouble grew daily more and more tragic; and the
trouble was that she wanted she knew not what. If her mother had said to
her squarely, "Tell me what it is will make you a bit more contented,
and you shall have it even if it kills me!" Hilda could only have
answered with the fervour of despair, "I don't know! I don't know!"
Her mother was a creature contented enough. And why not--with a
sufficient income, a comfortable home, and fair health? At the end of a
day devoted partly to sheer vacuous idleness and partly to the
monotonous simple machinery of physical existence--everlasting cookery,
everlasting cleanliness, everlasting stitchery--her mother did not with
a yearning sigh demand, "Must this sort of thing continue for ever, or
will a new era dawn?" Not a bit! Mrs. Lessways went to bed in the placid
expectancy of a very similar day on the morrow, and of an interminable
succession of such days. The which was incomprehensible and offensive to
Hilda.
She was in a prison with her mother, and saw no method of escape, saw
not so much as a locked door, saw nothing but blank walls. Even could
she by a miracle break prison, where should she look for the unknown
object of her desire, and for what should she look? Enigmas! It is true
that she read, occasionally with feverish enjoyment, especially verse.
But she did not and could not read enough. Of the shelf-ful of books
which in thirty years had drifted by one accident or another into the
Lessways household, she had read every volume, except Cruden's
Concordance. A heterogeneous and forlorn assemblage! Lavater's
_Physiognomy_, in a translation and in full calf! Thomson's _Seasons_,
which had thrilled her by its romantic beauty! Mrs. Henry Wood's
_Danesbury House_, and one or two novels by Charlotte M. Yonge and Dinah
Maria Craik, which she had gulped eagerly down for the mere interest of
their stories. Disraeli's _Ixion_, which she had admired without
understanding it. A _History of the North American Indians!_ These were
the more exciting items of the set. The most exciting of all was a green
volume of Tennyson's containing _Maud_. She knew _Maud_ by heart. By
simple unpleasant obstinacy she had forced her mother to give her this
volume for a birthday present, having seen a quotation from it in a
ladies' magazine. At that date in Turnhill, as in many other towns of
England, the poem had not yet lived down a reputation for immorality;
but fortunately Mrs. Lessways had only the vaguest notion of its
dangerousness, and was indeed a negligent kind of woman. Dangerous the
book was! Once in reciting it aloud in her room, Hilda had come so near
to fainting that she had had to stop and lie down on the bed, until she
could convince herself that she was not the male lover crying to his
beloved. An astounding and fearful experience, and not to be too lightly
renewed! For Hilda, _Maud_ was a source of lovely and exquisite pain.
Why had she not used her force of character to obtain more books? One
reason lay in the excessive difficulty to be faced. Birthdays are
infrequent; and besides, the enterprise of purchasing _Maud_ had proved
so complicated and tedious that Mrs. Lessways, with that curious
stiffness which marked her sometimes, had sworn never to attempt to buy
another book. Turnhill, a town of fifteen thousand persons, had no
bookseller; the only bookseller that Mrs. Lessways had ever heard of did
business at Oldcastle. Mrs. Lessways had journeyed twice over the
Hillport ridge to Oldcastle, in the odd quest of a book called _Maud_ by
"Tennyson--the poet laureate"; the book had had to be sent from London;
and on her second excursion to Oldcastle Mrs. Lessways had been caught
by the rain in the middle of Hillport Marsh. No! Hilda could not easily
demand the gift of another book, when all sorts of nice, really useful
presents could be bought in the High Street. Nor was there in Turnhill a
Municipal Library, nor any public lending-library.
Yet possibly Hilda's terrific egoism might have got fresh books somehow
from somewhere, had she really believed in the virtue of books. Thus
far, however, books had not furnished her with what she wanted, and her
faith in their promise was insecure.
Books failing, might she not have escaped into some vocation? The sole
vocation conceivable for her was that of teaching, and she knew, without
having tried it, that she abhorred teaching. Further, there was no
economical reason why she should work. In 1878, unless pushed by
necessity, no girl might dream of a vocation: the idea was monstrous; it
was almost unmentionable. Still further, she had no wish to work for
work's sake. Marriage remained. But she felt herself a child, ages short
of marriage. And she never met a man. It was literally a fact that,
except Mr. Skellorn, a few tradesmen, the vicar, the curate, and a
sidesman or so, she never even spoke to a man from one month's end to
the next. The Church choir had its annual dance, to which she was
invited; but the perverse creature cared not for dancing. Her mother did
not seek society, did not appear to require it. Nor did Hilda acutely
feel the lack of it. She could not define her need. All she knew was
that youth, moment by moment, was dropping down inexorably behind her.
And, still a child in heart and soul, she saw herself ageing, and then
aged, and then withered. Her twenty-first birthday was well above the
horizon. Soon, soon, she would be 'over twenty-one'! And she was not yet
born! That was it! She was not yet born! If the passionate strength of
desire could have done the miracle time would have stood still in the
heavens while Hilda sought the way of life.
And withal she was not wholly unhappy. Just as her attitude to her
mother was self-contradictory, so was her attitude towards existence.
Sometimes this profound infelicity of hers changed its hues for an
instant, and lo! it was bliss that she was bathed in. A phenomenon which
disconcerted her! She did not know that she had the most precious of all
faculties, the power to feel intensely.
III
Mr. Skellorn did not come; he was most definitely late.
From the window of her bedroom, at the front of the house, Hilda looked
westwards up toward the slopes of Chatterley Wood, where as a child she
used to go with other children to pick the sparse bluebells that thrived
on smoke. The bailiwick of Turnhill lay behind her; and all the murky
district of the Five Towns, of which Turnhill is the northern outpost,
lay to the south. At the foot of Chatterley Wood the canal wound in
large curves on its way towards the undefiled plains of Cheshire and the
sea. On the canal-side, exactly opposite to Hilda's window, was a
flour-mill, that sometimes made nearly as much smoke as the kilns and
chimneys closing the prospect on either hand. From the flour-mill a
bricked path, which separated a considerable row of new cottages from
their appurtenant gardens, led straight into Lessways Street, in front
of Mrs. Lessways' house. By this path Mr. Skellorn should have arrived,
for he inhabited the farthest of the cottages.
Hilda held Mr. Skellorn in disdain, as she held the row of cottages in
disdain. It seemed to her that Mr. Skellorn and the cottages
mysteriously resembled each other in their primness, their smugness,
their detestable self-complacency. Yet those cottages, perhaps thirty in
all, had stood for a great deal until Hilda, glancing at them, shattered
them with her scorn. The row was called Freehold Villas: a consciously
proud name in a district where much of the land was copyhold and could
only change owners subject to the payment of 'fines' and to the feudal
consent of a 'court' presided over by the agent of a lord of the manor.
Most of the dwellings were owned by their occupiers, who, each an
absolute monarch of the soil, niggled in his sooty garden of an evening
amid the flutter of drying shirts and towels. Freehold Villas symbolized
the final triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of the prudent
and industrious artisan. It corresponded with a Building Society
Secretary's dream of paradise. And indeed it was a very real
achievement. Nevertheless Hilda's irrational contempt would not admit
this. She saw in Freehold Villas nothing but narrowness (what long
narrow strips of gardens, and what narrow homes all flattened
together!), and uniformity, and brickiness, and polished brassiness, and
righteousness, and an eternal laundry.
From the upper floor of her own home she gazed destructively down upon
all that, and into the chill, crimson eye of the descending sun. Her own
home was not ideal, but it was better than all that. It was one of the
two middle houses of a detached terrace of four houses built by her
grandfather Lessways, the teapot manufacturer; it was the chief of the
four, obviously the habitation of the proprietor of the terrace. One of
the corner houses comprised a grocer's shop, and this house had been
robbed of its just proportion of garden so that the seigneurial
garden-plot might be triflingly larger than the others. The terrace was
not a terrace of cottages, but of houses rated at from twenty-six to
thirty-six pounds a year; beyond the means of artisans and petty
insurance agents and rent-collectors. And further, it was well built,
generously built; and its architecture, though debased, showed some
faint traces of Georgian amenity. It was admittedly the best row of
houses in that newly settled quarter of the town. In coming to it out of
Freehold Villas Mr. Skellorn obviously came to something superior,
wider, more liberal.
Suddenly Hilda heard her mother's voice, in a rather startled
conversational tone, and then another woman speaking; then the voices
died away. Mrs. Lessways had evidently opened the back door to somebody,
and taken her at once into the sitting-room. The occurrence was unusual.
Hilda went softly out on to the landing and listened, but she could
catch nothing more than a faint, irregular murmur. Scarcely had she
stationed herself on the landing when her mother burst out of the
sitting-room, and called loudly:
"Hilda!" And again in an instant, very impatiently and excitedly, long
before Hilda could possibly have appeared in response, had she been in
her bedroom, as her mother supposed her to be: "Hilda!"
Hilda could see without being seen. Mrs. Lessways' thin, wrinkled face,
bordered by her untidy but still black and glossy hair, was upturned
from below in an expression of tragic fretfulness. It was the
uncontrolled face, shamelessly expressive, of one who thinks himself
unwatched. Hilda moved silently to descend, and then demanded in a low
tone whose harsh self-possession was a reproof to that volatile
creature, her mother:
"What's the matter?"
Mrs. Lessways gave a surprised "Oh!" and like a flash her features
changed in the attempt to appear calm and collected.
"I was just coming downstairs," said Hilda. And to herself: "She's
always trying to pretend I'm nobody, but when the least thing happens
out of the way, she runs to me for all the world like a child." And as
Mrs. Lessways offered no reply, but simply stood at the foot of the
stairs, she asked again: "What is it?"
"Well," said her mother lamentably. "It's Mr. Skellorn. Here's Mrs.
Grant--"
"Who's Mrs. Grant?" Hilda inquired, with a touch of scorn, although she
knew perfectly well that Mr. Skellorn had a married daughter of that
name.
"Hsh! Hsh!" Mrs. Lessways protested, indicating the open door of the
sitting-room. "You know Mrs. Grant! It seems Mr. Skellorn has had a
paralytic stroke. Isn't it terrible?"
Hilda continued smoothly to descend the stairs, and followed her mother
into the sitting-room.
CHAPTER II
THE END OF THE SCENE
I
The linen money-bag and the account-book, proper to the last Wednesday
in the month, lay on the green damask cloth of the round table where
Hilda and her mother took their meals. A paralytic stroke had not been
drastic enough to mar Mr. Skellorn's most precious reputation for
probity and reliability. His statement of receipts and expenditure,
together with the corresponding cash, had been due at two o'clock, and
despite the paralytic stroke it was less than a quarter of an hour late.
On one side of the bag and the book were ranged the older women,--Mrs.
Lessways, thin and vivacious, and Mrs. Grant, large and solemn; and on
the other side, as it were in opposition, the young, dark, slim girl
with her rather wiry black hair, and her straight, prominent eyebrows,
and her extraordinary expression of uncompromising aloofness.
"She's just enjoying it, that's what she's doing!" said Hilda to
herself, of Mrs. Grant.
And the fact was that Mrs. Grant, quite unconsciously, did appear to be
savouring the catastrophe with pleasure. Although paralytic strokes were
more prevalent at that period than now, they constituted even then a
striking dramatic event. Moreover, they were considered as direct
visitations of God. Also there was something mysteriously and agreeably
impressive in the word 'paralytic,' which people would repeat for the
pleasure of repeating it. Mrs. Grant, over whose mighty breast flowed a
black mantle suited to the occasion, used the word again and again as
she narrated afresh for Hilda the history of the stroke.
"Yes," she said, "they came and fetched me out of my bed at three
o'clock this morning; and would you believe me, though he couldn't
hardly speak, the money and this here book was all waiting in his desk,
and he would have me come with it! And him sixty-seven! He always was
like that. And I do believe if he'd been paralysed on both sides instead
of only all down his right side, and speechless too, he'd ha' made me
understand as I must come here at two o'clock. If I'm a bit late it's
because I was kept at home with my son Enoch; he's got a whitlow that's
worrying the life out of him, our Enoch has."
Mrs. Lessways warmly deprecated any apology for inexactitude, and wiped
her sympathetic eyes.
"It's all over with father," Mrs. Grant resumed. "Doctor hinted to me
quiet-like as he'd never leave his bed again. He's laid himself down for
the rest of his days.... And he'd been warned! He'd had warnings. But
there!..."
Mrs. Grant contemplated with solemn gleeful satisfaction the
overwhelming grandeur of the disaster that had happened to her father.
The active old man, a continual figure of the streets, had been cut off
in a moment from the world and condemned for life to a mattress. She
sincerely imagined herself to be filled with proper grief; but an
aesthetic appreciation of the theatrical effectiveness of the misfortune
was certainly stronger in her than any other feeling. Observing that
Mrs. Lessways wept, she also drew out a handkerchief.
"I'm wishful for you to count the money," said Mrs. Grant. "I wouldn't
like there to be any--"
"Nay, that I'll not!" protested Mrs. Lessways.
Mrs. Grant's pressing duties necessitated her immediate departure. Mrs.
Lessways ceremoniously insisted on her leaving by the front door.
"I don't know where you'll find another rent-collector that's worth his
salt--in this town," observed Mrs. Grant, on the doorstep. "I can't
think _what_ you'll do, Mrs. Lessways!"
"I shall collect my rents myself," was the answer.
When Mrs. Grant had crossed the road and taken the bricked path leading
to the paralytic's house, Mrs. Lessways slowly shut the door and bolted
it, and then said to Hilda:
"Well, my girl, I do think you might have tried to show just a little
more feeling!"
They were close together in the narrow lobby, of which the heavy pulse
was the clock's ticking.
Hilda replied:
"You surely aren't serious about collecting those rents yourself, are
you, mother?"
"Serious? Of course I'm serious!" said Mrs. Lessways.
II
"Why shouldn't I collect the rents myself?" asked Mrs. Lessways.
This half-defiant question was put about two hours later. In the
meantime no remark had been made about the rents. Mother and daughter
were now at tea in the sitting-room. Hilda had passed the greater part
of those two hours upstairs in her bedroom, pondering on her mother's
preposterous notion of collecting the rents herself. Alone, she would
invent conversations with her mother, silencing the foolish woman with
unanswerable sarcastic phrases that utterly destroyed her illogical
arguments. She would repeat these phrases, repeat even entire
conversations, with pleasure; and, dwelling also with pleasure upon her
grievances against her mother, would gradually arrive at a state of
dull-glowing resentment. She could, if she chose, easily free her brain
from the obsession either by reading or by a sharp jerk of volition; but
often she preferred not to do so, saying to herself voluptuously: "No, I
_will_ nurse my grievance; I'll nurse it and nurse it and nurse it! It
is mine, and it is just, and anybody with any sense at all would admit
instantly that I am absolutely right." Thus it was on this afternoon.
When she came to tea her face was formidably expressive, nor would she
attempt to modify the rancour of those uncompromising features. On the
contrary, as soon as she saw that her mother had noticed her condition,
she deliberately intensified it.
Mrs. Lessways, who was incapable of sustained thought, and who had
completely forgotten and recalled the subject of the cottage-rents
several times since the departure of Mrs. Grant, nevertheless at once
diagnosed the cause of the trouble; and with her usual precipitancy
began to repulse an attack which had not even been opened. Mrs. Lessways
was not good at strategy, especially in conflicts with her daughter. She
was an ingenuous, hasty thing, and much too candidly human. And not only
was she deficient in practical common sense and most absurdly unable to
learn from experience, but she had not even the wit to cover her
shortcomings by resorting to the traditional authoritativeness of the
mother. Her brief, rare efforts to play the mother were ludicrous. She
was too simply honest to acquire stature by standing on her maternal
dignity. By a profound instinct she wistfully treated everybody as an
equal, as a fellow-creature; even her own daughter. It was not the way
to come with credit out of the threatened altercation about
rent-collecting.
As Hilda offered no reply, Mrs. Lessways said reproachfully:
"Hilda, you're too bad sometimes!" And then, after a further silence:
"Anyhow, I'm quite decided."
"Then what's the good of talking about it?" said the merciless child.
"But _why_ shouldn't I collect the rents myself? I'm not asking you to
collect them. And I shall save the five per cent., and goodness knows we
need it."
"You're more likely to lose twenty-five per cent.," said Hilda. "I'll
have some more tea, please."
Mrs. Lessways was quite genuinely scandalized. "You needn't think I
shall be easy with those Calder Street tenants, because I shan't! Not
me! I'm more likely to be too hard!"
"You'll be too hard, and you'll be too easy, too," said Hilda savagely.
"You'll lose the good tenants and you'll keep the bad ones, and the
houses will all go to rack and ruin, and then you'll sell all the
property at a loss. That's how it will be. And what shall you do if
you're not feeling well, and if it rains on Monday mornings?"
Hilda could conceive her mother forgetting all about the rents on Monday
morning, or putting them off till Monday afternoon on some grotesque
excuse. Her fancy heard the interminable complainings, devisings, futile
resolvings, of the self-appointed collector. It was impossible to
imagine a woman less fitted by nature than her mother to collect rents
from unthrifty artisans such as inhabited Calder Street. The project
sickened her. It would render the domestic existence an inferno.
As for Mrs. Lessways, she was shocked, for her project had seemed very
beautiful to her, and for the moment she was perfectly convinced that
she could collect rents and manage property as well as anyone. She was
convinced that her habits were regular, her temper firm and tactful, and
her judgment excellent. She was more than shocked; she was wounded. She
wept, as she pushed forward Hilda's replenished cup.
"You ought to take shame!" she murmured weakly, yet with certitude.
"Why?" said Hilda, feigning simplicity. "What have I said? _I_ didn't
begin. You asked me. I can't help what I think."
"It's your tone," said Mrs. Lessways grievously.
III
Despite all Hilda's terrible wisdom and sagacity, this remark of the
foolish mother's was the truest word spoken in the discussion. It was
Hilda's tone that was at the root of the evil. If Hilda, with the
intelligence as to which she was secretly so complacent, did not
amicably rule her mother, the unavoidable inference was that she was
either a clumsy or a wicked girl, or both. She indeed felt dimly that
she was a little of both. But she did not mind. Sitting there in the
small, familiar room, close to the sewing-machine, the steel fender, the
tarnished chandelier, and all the other daily objects which she at once
detested and loved, sitting close to her silly mother who angered her,
and yet in whom she recognized a quality that was mysteriously precious
and admirable, staring through the small window at the brown, tattered
garden-plot where blackened rhododendrons were swaying in the October
blast, she wilfully bathed herself in grim gloom and in an affectation
of despair.