Chapter 13

“Have you fastened the door?” he asked quietly, because of the landlady.

“Yes. Wait a minute.”

She rose and turned the lock, afraid he would burst it. She felt hatred towards him, because he did not leave her free. He entered, his pipe between his teeth, and she returned to her old position on the bed. He closed the door and stood with his back to it.

“What’s the matter?” he asked determinedly.

She was sick with him. She could not look at him.

“Can’t you leave me alone?” she replied, averting her face from him.

He looked at her quickly, fully, wincing with ignominy. Then he seemed to consider for a moment.

“There’s something up with you, isn’t there?” he asked definitely.

“Yes,” she said, “but that’s no reason why you should torment me.”

“I don’t torment you. What’s the matter?”

“Why should you know?” she cried, in hate and desperation.

Something snapped. He started and caught his pipe as it fell from his mouth. Then he pushed forward the bitten-off mouth-piece with his tongue, took it from off his lips, and looked at it. Then he put out his pipe, and brushed the ash from his waistcoat. After which he raised his head.

“I want to know,” he said. His face was greyish pale, and set uglily.

Neither looked at the other. She knew he was fired now. His heart was pounding heavily. She hated him, but she could not withstand him. Suddenly she lifted her head and turned on him.

“What right have you to know?” she asked.

He looked at her. She felt a pang of surprise for his tortured eyes and his fixed face. But her heart hardened swiftly. She had never loved him. She did not love him now.

But suddenly she lifted her head again swiftly, like a thing that tries to get free. She wanted to be free of it. It was not him so much, but it, something she had put on herself, that bound her so horribly. And having put the bond on herself, it was hardest to take it off. But now she hated everything and felt destructive. He stood with his back to the door, fixed, as if he would oppose her eternally, till she was extinguished. She looked at him. Her eyes were cold and hostile. His workman’s hands spread on the panels of the door behind him.

“You know I used to live here?” she began, in a hard voice, as if wilfully to wound him. He braced himself against her, and nodded.

“Well, I was companion to Miss Birch of Torril Hall—she and the rector were friends, and Archie was the rector’s son.” There was a pause. He listened without knowing what was happening. He stared at his wife. She was squatted in her white dress on the bed, carefully folding and refolding the hem of her skirt. Her voice was full of hostility.

“He was an officer—a sub-lieutenant—then he quarrelled with his colonel and came out of the army. At any rate”—she plucked at her skirt hem, her husband stood motionless, watching her movements which filled his veins with madness—“he was awfully fond of me, and I was of him—awfully.”

“How old was he?” asked the husband.

“When—when I first knew him? Or when he went away?——”

“When you first knew him.”

“When I first knew him, he was twenty-six—now—he’s thirty-one—nearly thirty-two—because I’m twenty-nine, and he is nearly three years older——”

She lifted her head and looked at the opposite wall.

“And what then?” said her husband.

She hardened herself, and said callously:

“We were as good as engaged for nearly a year, though nobody knew—at least—they talked—but—it wasn’t open. Then he went away——”

“He chucked you?” said the husband brutally, wanting to hurt her into contact with himself. Her heart rose wildly with rage. Then “Yes”, she said, to anger him. He shifted from one foot to the other, giving a “Ph!” of rage. There was silence for a time.

“Then,” she resumed, her pain giving a mocking note to her words, “he suddenly went out to fight in Africa, and almost the very day I first met you, I heard from Miss Birch he’d got sunstroke—and two months after, that he was dead——”

“That was before you took on with me?” said the husband.

There was no answer. Neither spoke for a time. He had not understood. His eyes were contracted uglily.

“So you’ve been looking at your old courting places!” he said. “That was what you wanted to go out by yourself for this morning.”

Still she did not answer him anything. He went away from the door to the window. He stood with his hands behind him, his back to her. She looked at him. His hands seemed gross to her, the back of his head paltry.

At length, almost against his will, he turned round, asking:

“How long were you carrying on with him?”

“What do you mean?” she replied coldly.

“I mean how long were you carrying on with him?”

She lifted her head, averting her face from him. She refused to answer. Then she said:

“I don’t know what you mean, by carrying on. I loved him from the first days I met him—two months after I went to stay with Miss Birch.”

“And do you reckon he loved you?” he jeered.

“I know he did.”

“How do you know, if he’d have no more to do with you?”

There was a long silence of hate and suffering.

“And how far did it go between you?” he asked at length, in a frightened, stiff voice.

“I hate your not-straightforward questions,” she cried, beside herself with his baiting. “We loved each other, and we _were_ lovers—we were. I don’t care what _you_ think: what have you got to do with it? We were lovers before ever I knew you——”

“Lovers—lovers,” he said, white with fury. “You mean you had your fling with an army man, and then came to me to marry you when you’d done——”

She sat swallowing her bitterness. There was a long pause.

“Do you mean to say you used to go—the whole hogger?” he asked, still incredulous.

“Why, what else do you think I mean?” she cried brutally.

He shrank, and became white, impersonal. There was a long, paralysed silence. He seemed to have gone small.

“You never thought to tell me all this before I married you,” he said, with bitter irony, at last.

“You never asked me,” she replied.

“I never thought there was any need.”

“Well, then, you _should_ think.”

He stood with expressionless, almost childlike set face, revolving many thoughts, whilst his heart was mad with anguish.

Suddenly she added:

“And I saw him today,” she said. “He is not dead, he’s mad.”

Her husband looked at her, startled.

“Mad!’ he said involuntarily.

“A lunatic,” she said. It almost cost her her reason to utter the word. There was a pause.

“Did he know you?” asked the husband in a small voice.

“No,” she said.

He stood and looked at her. At last he had learned the width of the breach between them. She still squatted on the bed. He could not go near her. It would be violation to each of them to be brought into contact with the other. The thing must work itself out. They were both shocked so much, they were impersonal, and no longer hated each other. After some minutes he left her and went out.

Goose Fair

I

Through the gloom of evening, and the flare of torches of the night before the fair, through the still fogs of the succeeding dawn came paddling the weary geese, lifting their poor feet that had been dipped in tar for shoes, and trailing them along the cobble-stones into the town. Last of all, in the afternoon, a country girl drove in her dozen birds, disconsolate because she was so late. She was a heavily built girl, fair, with regular features, and yet unprepossessing. She needed chiselling down, her contours were brutal. Perhaps it was weariness that hung her eyelids a little lower than was pleasant. When she spoke to her clumsily lagging birds it was in a snarling nasal tone. One of the silly things sat down in the gutter and refused to move. It looked very ridiculous, but also rather pitiful, squat there with its head up, refusing to be urged on by the ungentle toe of the girl. The latter swore heavily, then picked up the great complaining bird, and fronting her road stubbornly, drove on the lamentable eleven.

No one had noticed her. This afternoon the women were not sitting chatting on their doorsteps, seaming up the cotton hose, or swiftly passing through their fingers the piled white lace; and in the high dark houses the song of the hosiery frames was hushed: “Shackety-boom, Shackety-shackety-boom, Z—zzz!” As she dragged up Hollow Stone, people returned from the fair chaffed her and asked her what o’clock it was. She did not reply, her look was sullen. The Lace Market was quiet as the Sabbath: even the great brass plates on the doors were dull with neglect. There seemed an afternoon atmosphere of raw discontent. The girl stopped a moment before the dismal prospect of one of the great warehouses that had been gutted with fire. She looked at the lean, threatening walls, and watched her white flock waddling in reckless misery below, and she would have laughed out loud had the wall fallen flat upon them and relieved her of them. But the wall did not fall, so she crossed the road, and walking on the safe side, hurried after her charge. Her look was even more sullen. She remembered the state of trade—Trade, the invidious enemy; Trade, which thrust out its hand and shut the factory doors, and pulled the stockingers off their seats, and left the web half-finished on the frame; Trade, which mysteriously choked up the sources of the rivulets of wealth, and blacker and more secret than a pestilence, starved the town. Through this morose atmosphere of bad trade, in the afternoon of the first day of the fair, the girl strode down to the Poultry with eleven sound geese and one lame one to sell.

The Frenchmen were at the bottom of it! So everybody said, though nobody quite knew how. At any rate, they had gone to war with the Prussians and got beaten, and trade was ruined in Nottingham!

A little fog rose up, and the twilight gathered around. Then they flared abroad their torches in the fair, insulting the night. The girl still sat in the Poultry, and her weary geese unsold on the stones, illuminated by the hissing lamp of a man who sold rabbits and pigeons and such-like assorted live-stock.

II

In another part of the town, near Sneinton Church, another girl came to the door to look at the night. She was tall and slender, dressed with the severe accuracy which marks the girl of superior culture. Her hair was arranged with simplicity about the long, pale, cleanly cut face. She leaned forward very slightly to glance down the street, listening. She very carefully preserved the appearance of having come quite casually to the door, yet she lingered and lingered and stood very still to listen when she heard a footstep, but when it proved to be only a common man, she drew herself up proudly and looked with a small smile over his head. He hesitated to glance into the open hall, lighted so spaciously with a scarlet-shaded lamp, and at the slim girl in brown silk lifted up before the light. But she, she looked over his head. He passed on.

Presently she started and hung in suspense. Somebody was crossing the road. She ran down the steps in a pretty welcome, not effuse, saying in quick, but accurately articulated words: “Will! I began to think you’d gone to the fair. I came out to listen to it. I felt almost sure you’d gone. You’re coming in, aren’t you?” She waited a moment anxiously. “We expect you to dinner, you know,” she added wistfully.

The man, who had a short face and spoke with his lip curling up on one side, in a drawling speech with ironically exaggerated intonation, replied after a short hesitation:

“I’m awfully sorry, I am, straight, Lois. It’s a shame. I’ve got to go round to the biz. Man proposes—the devil disposes.” He turned aside with irony in the darkness.

“But surely, Will!” remonstrated the girl, keenly disappointed.

“Fact, Lois!—I feel wild about it myself. But I’ve got to go down to the works. They may be getting a bit warm down there, you know”—he jerked his head in the direction of the fair. “If the Lambs get frisky!—they’re a bit off about the work, and they’d just be in their element if they could set a lighted match to something——”

“Will, you don’t think——!” exclaimed the girl, laying her hand on his arm in the true fashion of romance, and looking up at him earnestly.

“Dad’s not sure,” he replied, looking down at her with gravity. They remained in this attitude for a moment, then he said:

“I might stop a bit. It’s all right for an hour, I should think.”

She looked at him earnestly, then said in tones of deep disappointment and of fortitude: “No, Will, you must go. You’d better go——”

“It’s a shame!” he murmured, standing a moment at a loose end. Then, glancing down the street to see he was alone, he put his arm round her waist and said in a difficult voice: “How goes it?”

She let him keep her for a moment, then he kissed her as if afraid of what he was doing. They were both uncomfortable.

“Well——!” he said at length.

“Good night!” she said, setting him free to go.

He hung a moment near her, as if ashamed. Then “Good night,” he answered, and he broke away. She listened to his footsteps in the night, before composing herself to turn indoors.

“Helloa!” said her father, glancing over his paper as she entered the dining-room. “What’s up, then?”

“Oh, nothing,” she replied, in her calm tones. “Will won’t be here to dinner tonight.”

“What, gone to the fair?”

“No.”

“Oh! What’s got him then?”

Lois looked at her father, and answered:

“He’s gone down to the factory. They are afraid of the hands.”

Her father looked at her closely.

“Oh, aye!” he answered, undecided, and they sat down to dinner.

III

Lois retired very early. She had a fire in her bedroom. She drew the curtains and stood holding aside a heavy fold, looking out at the night. She could see only the nothingness of the fog; not even the glare of the fair was evident, though the noise clamoured small in the distance. In front of everything she could see her own faint image. She crossed to the dressing-table, and there leaned her face to the mirror, and looked at herself. She looked a long time, then she rose, changed her dress for a dressing-jacket, and took up _Sesame and Lilies._

Late in the night she was roused from sleep by a bustle in the house. She sat up and heard a hurrying to and fro and the sound of anxious voices. She put on her dressing-gown and went out to her mother’s room. Seeing her mother at the head of the stairs, she said in her quick, clean voice:

“Mother, what it it?”

“Oh, child, don’t ask me! Go to bed, dear, do! I shall surely be worried out of my life.”

“Mother, what is it?” Lois was sharp and emphatic.

“I hope your father won’t go. Now I do hope your father won’t go. He’s got a cold as it is.”

“Mother, tell me what is it?” Lois took her mother’s arm.

“It’s Selby’s. I should have thought you would have heard the fire-engine, and Jack isn’t in yet. I hope we’re safe!” Lois returned to her bedroom and dressed. She coiled her plaited hair, and having put on a cloak, left the house.

She hurried along under the fog-dripping trees towards the meaner part of the town. When she got near, she saw a glare in the fog, and closed her lips tight. She hastened on till she was in the crowd. With peaked, noble face she watched the fire. Then she looked a little wildly over the fire-reddened faces in the crowd, and catching sight of her father, hurried to him.

“Oh, Dadda—is he safe? Is Will safe——?”

“Safe, aye, why not? You’ve no business here. Here, here’s Sampson, he’ll take you home. I’ve enough to bother me; there’s my own place to watch. Go home now, I can’t do with you here.”

“Have you seen Will?” she asked.

“Go home—Sampson, just take Miss Lois home—now!”

“You don’t really know where he is—father?”

“Go home now—I don’t want you here——” her father ordered peremptorily.

The tears sprang to Lois’ eyes. She looked at the fire and the tears were quickly dried by fear. The flames roared and struggled upward. The great wonder of the fire made her forget even her indignation at her father’s light treatment of herself and of her lover. There was a crashing and bursting of timber, as the first floor fell in a mass into the blazing gulf, splashing the fire in all directions, to the terror of the crowd. She saw the steel of the machines growing white-hot and twisting like flaming letters. Piece after piece of the flooring gave way, and the machines dropped in red ruin as the wooden framework burned out. The air became unbreathable; the fog was swallowed up; sparks went rushing up as if they would burn the dark heavens; sometimes cards of lace went whirling into the gulf of the sky, waving with wings of fire. It was dangerous to stand near this great cup of roaring destruction.

Sampson, the grey old manager of Buxton and Co’s, led her away as soon as she would turn her face to listen to him. He was a stout, irritable man. He elbowed his way roughly through the crowd, and Lois followed him, her head high, her lips closed. He led her for some distance without speaking, then at last, unable to contain his garrulous irritability, he broke out:

“What do they expect? What can they expect? They can’t expect to stand a bad time. They spring up like mushrooms as big as a house-side, but there’s no stability in ’em. I remember William Selby when he’d run on my errands. Yes, there’s some as can make much out of little, and there’s some as can make much out of nothing, but they find it won’t last. William Selby’s sprung up in a day, and he’ll vanish in a night. You can’t trust to luck alone. Maybe he thinks it’s a lucky thing this fire has come when things are looking black. But you can’t get out of it as easy as that. There’s been a few too many of ’em. No, indeed, a fire’s the last thing I should hope to come to—the very last!”

Lois hurried and hurried, so that she brought the old manager panting in distress up the steps of her home. She could not bear to hear him talking so. They could get no one to open the door for some time. When at last Lois ran upstairs, she found her mother dressed, but all unbuttoned again, lying back in the chair in her daughter’s room, suffering from palpitation of the heart, with _Sesame and Lilies_ crushed beneath her. Lois administered brandy, and her decisive words and movements helped largely to bring the good lady to a state of recovery sufficient to allow of her returning to her own bedroom.

Then Lois locked the door. She glanced at her fire-darkened face, and taking the flattened Ruskin out of the chair, sat down and wept. After a while she calmed herself, rose, and sponged her face. Then once more on that fatal night she prepared for rest. Instead, however, or retiring, she pulled a silk quilt from her disordered bed and wrapping it round her, sat miserably to think. It was two o’clock in the morning.

IV

The fire was sunk to cold ashes in the grate, and the grey morning was creeping through the half-opened curtains like a thing ashamed, when Lois awoke. It was painful to move her head: her neck was cramped. The girl awoke in full recollection. She sighed, roused herself and pulled the quilt closer about her. For a little while she sat and mused. A pale, tragic resignation fixed her face like a mask. She remembered her father’s irritable answer to her question concerning her lover’s safety—“Safe, aye—why not?” She knew that he suspected the factory of having been purposely set on fire. But then, he had never liked Will. And yet—and yet—Lois’ heart was heavy as lead. She felt her lover was guilty. And she felt she must hide her secret of his last communication to her. She saw herself being cross-examined—“When did you last see this man?” But she would hide what he had said about watching at the works. How dreary it was—and how dreadful. Her life was ruined now, and nothing mattered any more. She must only behave with dignity, and submit to her own obliteration. For even if Will were never accused, she knew in her heart he was guilty. She knew it was over between them.

It was dawn among the yellow fog outside, and Lois, as she moved mechanically about her toilet, vaguely felt that all her days would arrive slowly struggling through a bleak fog. She felt an intense longing at this uncanny hour to slough the body’s trammelled weariness and to issue at once into the new bright warmth of the far Dawn where a lover waited transfigured; it is so easy and pleasant in imagination to step out of the chill grey dampness of another terrestrial daybreak, straight into the sunshine of the eternal morning! And who can escape his hour? So Lois performed the meaningless routine of her toilet, which at last she made meaningful when she took her black dress, and fastened a black jet brooch at her throat.

Then she went downstairs and found her father eating a mutton chop. She quickly approached and kissed him on the forehead. Then she retreated to the other end of the table. Her father looked tired, even haggard.

“You are early,” he said, after a while. Lois did not reply. Her father continued to eat for a few moments, then he said:

“Have a chop—here’s one! Ring for a hot plate. Eh, what? Why not?”

Lois was insulted, but she gave no sign. She sat down and took a cup of coffee, making no pretence to eat. Her father was absorbed, and had forgotten her.

“Our Jack’s not come home yet,” he said at last.

Lois stirred faintly. “Hasn’t he?” she said.

“No.” There was silence for a time. Lois was frightened. Had something happened also to her brother? This fear was closer and more irksome.

“Selby’s was cleaned out, gutted. We had a near shave of it——”

“You have no loss, Dadda?”

“Nothing to mention.” After another silence, her father said:

“I’d rather be myself than William Selby. Of course it may merely be bad luck—you don’t know. But whatever it was, I wouldn’t like to add one to the list of fires just now. Selby was at the ‘George’ when it broke out—I don’t know where the lad was——!”

“Father,” broke in Lois, “why do you talk like that? Why do you talk as if Will had done it?” She ended suddenly. Her father looked at her pale, mute face.

“I don’t talk as if Will had done it,” he said. “I don’t even think it.”

Feeling she was going to cry, Lois rose and left the room. Her father sighed, and leaning his elbows on his knees, whistled faintly into the fire. He was not thinking about her.

Lois went down to the kitchen and asked Lucy, the parlour-maid, to go out with her. She somehow shrank from going alone, lest people should stare at her overmuch: and she felt an overpowering impulse to go to the scene of the tragedy, to judge for herself.

The churches were chiming half-past eight when the young lady and the maid set off down the street. Nearer the fair, swarthy, thin-legged men were pushing barrels of water towards the market-place, and the gipsy women, with hard brows, and dressed in tight velvet bodices, hurried along the pavement with jugs of milk, and great brass water ewers and loaves and breakfast parcels. People were just getting up, and in the poorer streets was a continual splash of tea-leaves, flung out on to the cobble-stones. A teapot came crashing down from an upper story just behind Lois, and she, starting round and looking up, thought that the trembling, drink-bleared man at the upper window, who was stupidly staring after his pot, had had designs on her life; and she went on her way shuddering at the grim tragedy of life.

In the dull October morning the ruined factory was black and ghastly. The window-frames were all jagged, and the walls stood gaunt. Inside was a tangle of twisted _débris_, the iron, in parts red with bright rust, looking still hot; the charred wood was black and satiny; from dishevelled heaps, sodden with water, a faint smoke rose dimly. Lois stood and looked. If he had done that! He might even be dead there, burned to ash and lost for ever. It was almost soothing to feel so. He would be safe in the eternity which now she must hope in.