Читать книгу HILDA LESSWAYS - Arnold Bennett - Страница 14

The Market Square of Turnhill was very large for the size of the town. The diminutive town hall, which in reality was nothing but a watch-house, seemed to be a mere incident on its irregular expanse, to which the two-storey shops and dwellings made a low border. Behind this crimson, blue-slated border rose the loftier forms of a church and a large chapel, situate in adjacent streets. The square was calm and almost deserted in the gloom. It typified the slow tranquillity of the bailiwick, which was removed from the central life of the Five Towns, and unconnected therewith by even a tram or an omnibus. Only within recent years had Turnhill got so much as a railway station—rail-head of a branch line. Turnhill was the extremity of civilization in those parts. Go northwards out of this Market Square, and you would soon find yourself amid the wild and hilly moorlands, sprinkled with iron-and-coal villages whose red-flaming furnaces illustrated the eternal damnation which was the chief article of their devout religious belief. And in the Market Square not even the late edition of the Staffordshire Signal was cried, though it was discreetly on sale with its excellent sporting news in a few shops. In the hot and malodorous candle-lit factories, where the real strenuous life of the town would remain cooped up for another half-hour of the evening, men and women had yet scarcely taken to horse-racing; they would gamble upon rabbits, cocks, pigeons, and their own fists, without the mediation of the Signal. The one noise in the Market Square was the bell of a hawker selling warm pikelets at a penny each for the high tea of the tradesmen. The hawker was a deathless institution, a living proof that withdrawn Turnhill would continue always to be exactly what it always had been. Still, to the east of the Square, across the High Street, a vast space was being cleared of hovels for the erection of a new town hall daringly magnificent.

Hilda crossed the Square, scorning it.

She said to herself: “I’d better get the thing over before I buy the thread. I should never be able to stand Miss Dayson’s finicking! I should scream out!” But the next instant, with her passion for proving to herself how strong she could be, she added: “Well, I just will buy the thread first!” And she went straight into Dayson’s little fancy shop, which was full of counter and cardboard boxes and Miss Dayson, and stayed therein for at least five minutes, emerging with a miraculously achieved leisureliness. A few doors away was a somewhat new building, of three storeys—the highest in the Square. The ground floor was an ironmongery; it comprised also a side entrance, of which the door was always open. This side entrance showed a brass-plate, “Q. Karkeek, Solicitor.” And the wire-blinds of the two windows of the first floor also bore the words: “Q. Karkeek, Solicitor. Q. Karkeek, Solicitor.” The queerness of the name had attracted Hilda’s attention several years earlier, when the signs were fresh. It was an accident that she had noticed it; she had not noticed the door-plates or the wire-blinds of other solicitors. She did not know Mr. Q. Karkeek by sight, nor even whether he was old or young, married or single, agreeable or repulsive.

The side entrance gave directly on to a long flight of naked stairs, and up these stairs Hilda climbed into the unknown, towards the redoubtable and the perilous. “I’m bound to be seen,” she said to herself, “but I don’t care, and I don’t care!” At the top of the stairs was a passage, at right angles, and then a glazed door with the legend in black letters, “Q. Karkeek, Solicitor,” and two other doors mysteriously labelled “Private.” She opened the glazed door, and saw a dirty middle-aged man on a stool, and she said at once to him, in a harsh, clear, deliberate voice, without giving herself time to reflect:

“I want to see Mr. Karkeek.”

The man stared at her sourly, as if bewildered.

She said to herself: “I shan’t be able to stand this excitement much longer.”

“You can’t see Mr. Karkeek,” said the man. “Mr. Karkeek’s detained at Hanbridge County Court. But if you’re in such a hurry like, you’d better see Mr. Cannon. It’s Mr. Cannon as they generally do see. Who d’ye come from, miss?”

“Come from?” Hilda repeated, unnerved.

“What name?”

She had not expected this. “I suppose I shall have to tell him!” she said to herself, and aloud: “Lessways.”

“Oh! Ah!” exclaimed the man. “Bless us! Yes!” It was as if he had said: “Of course it’s Lessways! And don’t I know all about you!” And Hilda was overwhelmed by the sense of the enormity of the folly which she was committing.

The man swung half round on his stool, and seized the end of an india-rubber tube which hung at the side of the battered and littered desk, just under a gas-jet. He spoke low, like a conspirator, into the mouthpiece of the tube. “Miss Lessways—to see you, sir.” Then very quickly he clapped the tube to his ear and listened. And then he put it to his mouth again and repeated: “Lessways.” Hilda was agonized.

“I’ll ask ye to step this way, miss,” said the man, slipping off his stool. At the same time he put a long inky penholder, which he had been holding in his wrinkled right hand, between his teeth.

“Never,” thought Hilda as she followed the clerk, in a whirl of horrible misgivings, “never have I done anything as mad as this before! I’m under twenty-one!”