Helen with the High Hand | Page 3

majestic activities of the ground-man
on the bowling-green, and having glanced at his watch, Mr.
Ollerenshaw sat down on the nearest bench; he was waiting for an
opponent, the captain of the bowling-club. It is exactly at the instant of
his downsitting that the drama about to be unfolded properly begins.

Strolling along from the northern extremity of the terrace to the
southern was a young woman. This young woman, as could be judged
from her free and independent carriage, was such a creature as, having
once resolved to do a thing, is not to be deterred from doing it by the
caprices of other people. She had resolved--a resolution of no
importance whatever--to seat herself on precisely the southernmost
bench of the terrace. There was not, indeed, any particular reason why
she should have chosen the southernmost bench; but she had chosen it.
She had chosen it, afar off, while it was yet empty and Mr. Ollerenshaw
was on his feet. When Mr. Ollerenshaw dropped into a corner of it the
girl's first instinctive volition was to stop, earlier than she had intended,
at one of the other seats.
Despite statements to the contrary, man is so little like a sheep that
when he has a choice of benches in a park he will always select an
empty one. This rule is universal in England and Scotland, though
elsewhere exceptions to it have been known to occur. But the girl,
being a girl, and being a girl who earned her own living, and being a
girl who brought all conventions to the bar of her reason and forced
them to stand trial there, said to herself, proudly and coldly: "It would
be absurd on my part to change my mind. I meant to occupy that bench,
and why should I not? There is amply sufficient space for the man and
me too. He has taken one corner, and I will take the other. These
notions that girls have are silly." She meant the notion that she herself
had had.
So she floated forward, charmingly and inexorably. She was what in
the Five Towns is called "a stylish piece of goods." She wore a
black-and-white frock, of a small check pattern, with a black belt and
long black gloves, and she held over her serenity a black parasol richly
flounced with black lace--a toilet unusual in the district, and as
effective as it was unusual. She knew how to carry it. She was a tall girl,
and generously formed, with a complexion between fair and dark; her
age, perhaps, about twenty-five. She had the eye of an empress--and
not an empress-consort either, nor an empress who trembles in secret at
the rumour of cabals and intrigues. Yes, considered as a decoration of
the terrace, she was possibly the finest, most dazzling thing that

Bursley could have produced; and Bursley doubtless regretted that it
could only claim her as a daughter by adoption.
Approaching, step by dainty and precise step, the seat invested by Mr.
James Ollerenshaw, she arrived at the point whence she could
distinguish the features of her forestaller; she was somewhat
short-sighted. She gave no outward sign of fear, irresolution, cowardice.
But if she had not been more afraid of her own contempt than of
anything else in the world, she would have run away; she would have
ceased being an empress and declined suddenly into a scared child.
However, her fear of her own contempt kept her spine straight, her face
towards the danger, and her feet steadily moving.
"It's not my fault," she said to herself. "I meant to occupy that bench,
and occupy it I will. What have I to be ashamed of?"
And she did occupy that bench. She contrived to occupy it without
seeing Mr. Ollerenshaw. Each separate movement of hers denied
absolutely the existence of Mr. Ollerenshaw. She arranged her dress,
and her parasol, and her arms, and the exact angle of her chin; and there
gradually fell upon her that stillness which falls upon the figure of a
woman when she has definitively adopted an attitude in the public eye.
She was gazing at the gold angel, a mile off, which flashed in the sun.
But what a deceptive stillness was that stillness! A hammer was
hammering away under her breast with what seemed to her a
reverberating sound. Strange that that hammering did not excite
attention throughout the park! Then she had the misfortune to think of
the act of blushing. She violently willed not to blush. But her blood was
too much for her. It displayed itself in the most sanguinary manner first
in the centre of each cheek, and it increased its area of conquest until
the whole of her visible skin--even the back of her neck and her
lobes--had