Hilda Lessways

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Hilda Lessways

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hilda Lessways, by Arnold Bennett This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Hilda Lessways
Author: Arnold Bennett
Release Date: January 9, 2004 [EBook #10658]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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HILDA LESSWAYS
BY ARNOLD BENNETT
1911

CONTENTS
BOOK I HER START IN LIFE
I AN EVENT IN MR. SKELLORN'S LIFE II THE END OF THE SCENE III MR. CANNON IV DOMESTICITY INVADED V MRS. LESSWAYS' SHREWDNESS VI VICTOR HUGO AND ISAAC PITMAN VII THE EDITORIAL SECRETARY VIII JANET ORGREAVE IX IN THE STREET X MISS GAILEY IN DECLENSION XI DISILLUSION XII THE TELEGRAM XIII HILDA'S WORLD XIV TO LONDON
BOOK II HER RECOVERY
I SIN II THE LITTLE ROOM III JOURNEY TO BLEAKRIDGE IV WITH THE ORGREAVES V EDWIN CLAYHANGER VI IN THE GARDEN VII THE NEXT MEETING
BOOK III HER BURDEN
I HILDA INDISPENSABLE II SARAH'S BENEFACTOR III AT BRIGHTON IV THE SEA
BOOK IV HER FALL
I THE GOING CONCERN II THE UNKNOWN ADVENTURE III FLORRIE AGAIN
BOOK V HER DELIVERANCE
I LOUISA UNCONTROLLED II SOME SECRET HISTORY
BOOK VI HER PUNISHMENT
I EVENING AT BLEAKRIDGE II A RENDEZVOUS III AT THE WORKS IV THE CALL FROM BRIGHTON V THURSDAY AFTERNOON VI MISCHANCE
* * * * *

BOOK I HER START IN LIFE
CHAPTER I
AN EVENT IN MR. SKELLORN'S LIFE
I
The Lessways household, consisting of Hilda and her widowed mother, was temporarily without a servant. Hilda hated domestic work, and because she hated it she often did it passionately and thoroughly. That afternoon, as she emerged from the kitchen, her dark, defiant face was full of grim satisfaction in the fact that she had left a kitchen polished and irreproachable, a kitchen without the slightest indication that it ever had been or ever would be used for preparing human nature's daily food; a show kitchen. Even the apron which she had worn was hung in concealment behind the scullery door. The lobby clock, which stood over six feet high and had to be wound up every night by hauling on a rope, was noisily getting ready to strike two. But for Mrs. Lessways' disorderly and undesired assistance, Hilda's task might have been finished a quarter of an hour earlier. She passed quietly up the stairs. When she was near the top, her mother's voice, at once querulous and amiable, came from the sitting-room:
"Where are you going to?"
There was a pause, dramatic for both of them, and in that minute pause the very life of the house seemed for an instant to be suspended, and then the waves of the hostile love that united these two women resumed their beating, and Hilda's lips hardened.
"Upstairs," she answered callously.
No reply from the sitting-room!
At two o'clock on the last Wednesday of every month, old Mr. Skellorn, employed by Mrs. Lessways to collect her cottage-rents, called with a statement of account, and cash in a linen bag. He was now due. During his previous visit Hilda had sought to instil some common sense into her mother on the subject of repairs, and there had ensued an altercation which had never been settled.
"If I stayed down, she wouldn't like it," Hilda complained fiercely within herself, "and if I keep away she doesn't like that either! That's mother all over!"
She went to her bedroom. And into the soft, controlled shutting of the door she put more exasperated vehemence than would have sufficed to bang it off its hinges.
II
At this date, late October in 1878, Hilda was within a few weeks of twenty-one. She was a woman, but she could not realize that she was a woman. She remembered that when she first went to school, at the age of eight, an assistant teacher aged nineteen had seemed to her to be unquestionably and absolutely a woman, had seemed to belong definitely to a previous generation. The years had passed, and Hilda was now older than that mature woman was then; and yet she could not feel adult, though her childhood gleamed dimly afar off, and though the intervening expanse of ten years stretched out like a hundred years, like eternity. She was in trouble; the trouble grew daily more and more tragic; and the trouble was that she wanted she knew not what. If her mother had said to her squarely, "Tell me what it is will make you a bit more contented, and you shall have it even if it kills me!" Hilda could only have answered with the fervour of despair, "I don't know! I don't know!"
Her mother was a creature contented enough. And why not--with a sufficient