Читать книгу The Complete Clayhanger Family Novels (Clayhanger + Hilda Lessways + These Twain + The Roll Call) - Arnold Bennett - Страница 166

At five minutes to two, as he stood behind the eternal counter in his eternal dream, he had the inexpressible and delectable shock of seeing her. He was shot by the vision of her as by a bullet. She came in, hurried and preoccupied, apparently full of purpose.

“Have you got a Bradshaw?” she inquired, after the briefest greeting, gazing at him across the counter through her veil, as though imploring him for Bradshaw.

“I’m afraid we haven’t one left,” he said. “You see it’s getting on for the end of the month. I could—No, I suppose you want it at once?”

“I want it now,” she replied. “I’m going to London by the six express, and what I want to know is whether I can get on to Brighton to-night. They actually haven’t a Bradshaw up there,” half in scorn and half in levity, “and they said you’d probably have one here. So I ran down.”

“They’d be certain to have one at the Tiger,” he murmured, reflecting.

“The Tiger!” Evidently she did not care for the idea of the Tiger. “What about the railway station?”

“Yes, or the railway station. I’ll go up there with you now if you like, and find out for you. I know the head porter. We’re just closing. Father’s at home. He’s not very well.”

She thanked him, relief in her voice.

In a minute he had put his hat and coat on and given instructions to Stifford, and he was climbing Duck Bank with Hilda at his side. He had forgiven her. Nay, he had forgotten her crime. The disaster, with all its despair, was sponged clean from his mind like writing off a slate, and as rapidly. It was effaced. He tried to collect his faculties and savour the new sensations. But he could not. Within him all was incoherent, wild, and distracting. Five minutes earlier, and he could not have conceived the bliss of walking with her to the station. Now he was walking with her to the station; and assuredly it was bliss, and yet he did not fully taste it. Though he would not have loosed her for a million pounds, her presence gave an even crueller edge to his anxiety and apprehension. London! Brighton! Would she be that night in Brighton? He felt helpless, and desperate. And beneath all this was the throbbing of a strange, bitter joy. She asked about his cold and about his father’s indisposition. She said nothing of her failure to appear on the previous day, and he knew not how to introduce it neatly: he was not in control of his intelligence.

They passed Snaggs’ Theatre, and from its green, wooden walls came the obscure sound of humanity in emotion. Before the mean and shabby portals stood a small crowd of ragged urchins. Posters printed by Darius Clayhanger made white squares on the front.

“It’s a meeting of the men,” said Edwin.

“They’re losing, aren’t they?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I expect they are.”

She asked what the building was, and he explained.

“They used to call it the Blood Tub,” he said.

She shivered. “The Blood Tub?”

“Yes. Melodrama and murder and gore—you know.”

“How horrible!” she exclaimed. “Why are people like that in the Five Towns?”

“It’s our form of poetry, I suppose,” he muttered, smiling at the pavement, which was surprisingly dry and clean in the feeble sunshine.

“I suppose it is!” she agreed heartily, after a pause.

“But you belong to the Five Towns, don’t you?” he asked.

“Oh yes! I used to.”

At the station the name of Bradshaw appeared to be quite unknown. But Hilda’s urgency impelled them upwards from the head porter to the ticket clerk, and from the ticket clerk to the stationmaster; and at length they discovered, in a stuffy stove-heated room with a fine view of a shawd-ruck and a pithead, that on Thursday evenings there was a train from Victoria to Brighton at eleven-thirty. Hilda seemed to sigh relief, and her demeanour changed. But Edwin’s uneasiness was only intensified. Brighton, which he had never seen, was in another hemisphere for him. It was mysterious, like her. It was part of her mystery. What could he do? His curse was that he had no initiative. Without her relentless force, he would never have penetrated even as far as the stuffy room where the unique Bradshaw lay. It was she who had taken him to the station, not he her. How could he hold her back from Brighton?