Hilda Lessways by Arnold Bennett (some good books to read txt) 📕

about it. She was aware that Mr. Cannon meant to establish it first as a weekly, and then, when it had grown, to transform it into a daily and wage war with that powerful monopolist, _The Staffordshire Signal_, which from its offices at Hanbridge covered the entire district. The original title had been _The Turnhill Guardian and Five Towns General Chronicle,_ and she had approved it; but when Mr. Cannon, with a view to the intended development, had inverted the title to _The Five Towns Chronicle and Turnhill Guardian_, she had enthusiastically applauded his deep wisdom. Also she had applauded his project of moving, later on, to Hanbridge, the natural centre of the Five Towns. This was nearly the limit of her knowledge. She neither knew nor cared anything about the resources or the politics or the programme or the prospects of the paper. To her all newspapers were much alike. She did not even explore, in meditation, the extraordinary psychology of Mr. Cannon--the man whose original energy and restless love of initiative was leading him to found a newspaper on the top of a successful but audaciously irregular practice as a lawyer. She incuriously and with religious admiration accepted Mr. Cannon as she accepted the idea of the paper. And being, of course, entirely ignorant of journalism, she was not in a position to criticize the organizing arrangements of the newspaper. Not that these would have seemed excessively peculiar to anybody familiar with the haphazard improvisations of minor journalism in the provinces! She had indeed, in her innocence, imagined that the basic fact of a newspaper enterprise would be a printing-press; but when Mr. Dayson, who had been on _The Signal_ and on sundry country papers in Shropshire, assured her that the majority of weekly sheets were printed on jobbing presses in private hands, she corrected her foolish notion.

Her sole interest--but it was tremendous!--lay in what she herself had to do--namely, take down from dictation, transcribe, copy, classify, and keep letters and documents, and occasionally correct proofs. All beyond this was misty for her, and she never adjusted her sight in order to pierce the mist.

Save for her desire to perfect herself in her duties, she had no desire. She was content. In the dismal, dirty, untidy, untidiable, uncomfortable office, arctic near the windows, and tropic near the stove, with dust on her dress and ink on her fingers and the fumes of gas in her quivering nostrils, and her mind strained and racked by an exaggerated sense of her responsibilities, she was in heaven! She who so vehemently objected to the squalid mess of the business of domesticity, revelled in the squalid mess of this business. She whose heart would revolt because Florrie's work was never done, was delighted to wait all hours on the convenience of men who seemed to be the very incarnation of incalculable change and caprice. And what was she? Nothing but a clerk, at a commencing salary of fifteen shillings per week! Ah! but she was a priestess! She had a vocation which was unsoiled by the economic excuse. She was a pioneer. No young woman had ever done what she was doing. She was the only girl in the Five Towns who knew shorthand. And in a fortnight (they said) the paper was to come out!


III


At the large table which was laden with prodigious, heterogeneous masses of paper and general litter, she bent over the proofs by Mr. Dayson's side. He had one proof; she had a duplicate; the copy lay between them. It was the rough galley of a circular to the burgesses that they were correcting together. Reading and explaining aloud, he inscribed the cabalistic signs of correction in the margin of his proof, and she faithfully copied them in the margin of hers, for practice.

"l.c.," he intoned.

"What does that mean?"

"Lower case," he explained grandiosely, in the naive vanity of his knowledge. "Small letter; not a capital."

"Thank you," she said, and, writing "l.c.," noted in her striving brain that 'lower case' meant a small letter instead of a capital; but she knew not why, and she did not ask; the reason did not trouble her.

"I think we'll put 'enlightened' there, before 'public' Ring it, will you?"

"Ring it? Oh! I see!"

"Yes, put a ring round the word in the margin. That's to show it isn't the intelligent compositor's mistake, you see!"

Then there was a familiar and masterful footstep on the stairs, and the attention of both of them wavered.


IV


Arthur Dayson and his proof-correcting lost all interest and all importance for Hilda as Mr. Cannon came into the room. The unconscious, expressive gesture, scornful and abrupt, with which she neglected them might have been terribly wounding to a young man more sensitive than Dayson. But Dayson, in his self-sufficient, good-natured mediocrity, had the hide of an alligator. He even judged her movement quite natural, for he was a flunkey born. Hilda gazed at her master with anxiety as he deposited his black walking-stick in the corner behind the door and loosed his white muffler and large overcoat (which Dayson called an 'immensikoff.') She thought the master looked tired and worried. Supposing he fell ill at this supreme juncture! The whole enterprise would be scotched, and not forty Daysons could keep it going! The master was doing too much--law by day and journalism by night. They were perhaps all doing too much, but the others did not matter. Nevertheless, Mr. Cannon advanced to the table buoyant and faintly smiling, straightening his shoulders back, proudly proving to himself and to them that his individual force was inexhaustible. That straightening of the shoulders always affected Hilda as something wistful, as almost pathetic in its confident boyishness. It made her feel maternal and say to herself (but not in words) with a sort of maternal superiority: "How brave he is, poor thing!" Yes, in her heart she would apply the epithet 'poor thing' to this grand creature whose superiority she acknowledged with more fervour than anybody. As for the undaunted straightening of the shoulders, she adopted it, and after a time it grew to be a characteristic gesture with her.

"Well?" Mr. Cannon greeted them.

"Well," said Arthur Dayson, with a factitious air of treating him as an equal, "I've been round to Bennions and made it clear to him that if he can't guarantee to run off a maximum of two thousand of an eight-page sheet we shall have to try Clayhanger at Bursley, even if it's the last minute."

"What did he say?"

"Grunted."

"I shall risk two thousand, any way."

"Paper delivered, governor?" Dayson asked in a low voice, leering pawkily, as though to indicate that he was a man who could be trusted to think of everything.

"Will be to-morrow, I think," said Mr. Cannon. "Got that letter ready, Miss Lessways?"

Hilda sprang into life.

"Yes," she said, handing it diffidently. "But if you'd like me to do it again--you see it's--"

"Plethora of H2O," Dayson put in, indulgent.

"Oh no!" Mr. Cannon decided. Having read the letter, he gave it to Dayson. "It doesn't matter, but you ought to have signed it before it was copied in the letter-book."

"Gemini! Miss!" murmured Dayson, glancing at Hilda with uplifted brows.

The fact was that both of them had forgotten this formality. Dayson took a pen, and after describing a few flourishes in the air, about a quarter of an inch above the level of the paper, he magnificently signed: "Dayson & Co." Such was the title of the proprietorship. Just as Karkeek was Mr. Cannon's dummy in the law, so was Dayson in the newspaper business. But whereas Karkeek was privately ashamed, Dayson was proud of his role, which gave him the illusion of power and glory.

"Just take this down, will you?" said Mr. Cannon.

Hilda grasped at her notebook and seized a pencil, and then held herself tense to receive the message, staring downwards at the blank page. Dayson lolled in his chair, throwing his head back. He knew that the presence of himself, the great shorthand expert, made Hilda nervous when she had to write from dictation; and this flattered his simple vanity. Hilda hated and condemned her nervousness, but she could not conquer it.

Mr. Cannon, standing over the table, pushed his hat away from his broad, shining forehead, and then, meditative, absently lifted higher his carefully tended hand and lowered the singing gas-jet, only to raise it again.

"Mr. Ezra Brunt. Dear Sir, Re advertisement. With reference to your letter replying to ours in which you inquire as to the circulation of the above newspaper, we beg to state that it is our intention to print four thousand of--"

"Two thousand," Hilda interrupted confidently.

Unruffled, Mr. Cannon went on politely: "No--four thousand of the first number. Our representative would be pleased to call upon you by appointment. Respectfully yours.--You might sign that, Dayson, and get it off to-night. Is Sowter here?"

For answer, Dayson jerked his head towards an inner door. Sowter was the old clerk who had first received Hilda into the offices of Mr. Q. Karkeek. He was earning a little extra money by clerical work at nights in connection with the advertisement department of the new organ.

Mr. Cannon marched to the inner door and opened it. Then he turned and called:

"Dayson--a moment."

"Certainly," said Dayson, jumping up. He planted his hat doggishly at the back of his head, stuck his hands into his pockets, and swaggered after his employer.

The inner door closed on the three men. Hilda, staring at the notebook, blushing and nibbling at the pencil, was left alone under the gas. She could feel her heart beating violently.



CHAPTER VIII JANET ORGREAVE

I


"Our friend is waiting for that letter to Brunt," said Arthur Dayson, emerging from the inner room, a little later.

"In one moment," Hilda replied coldly, though she had not begun to write the letter.

Dayson disappeared, nodding.

She resented his referring to Mr. Cannon as 'our friend,' but she did not know why, unless it was that she vaguely regarded it as presumptuous, or, in the alternative, if he meant to be facetious, as ill-bred, on the part of Arthur Dayson. She chose a sheet of paper, and wrote the letter in longhand, as quickly as she could, but with arduous care in the formation of every character; she wrote with the whole of her faculties fully applied. Even in the smallest task she could not economize herself; she had to give all or nothing. When she came to the figures--4000--she intensified her ardour, lavishing enormous unnecessary force: it was like a steamhammer cracking a nut. Her conscience had instantly and finally decided against her. But she ignored her conscience. She knew and owned that she was wrong to abet Mr. Cannon's deception. And she abetted it. She would have abetted it if she had believed that the act would involve her in everlasting damnation,--not solely out of loyalty to Mr. Cannon; only a little out of loyalty; chiefly out of mere unreasoning pride and obstinate adherence to a decision.

The letter finished, she took it into the inner room, where the three men sat in mysterious conclave. Mr. Cannon read it over, and then Arthur Dayson borrowed the old clerk's vile pen and with the ceremonious delays due to his sense of his own importance, flourishingly added the signature.

When she came forth she heard a knock at the outer door.

"Come in," she commanded defiantly, for she was still unconsciously in the defiant mood