Hilda Lessways | Page 3

vicar, the curate, and a
sidesman or so, she never even spoke to a man from one month's end to
the next. The Church choir had its annual dance, to which she was
invited; but the perverse creature cared not for dancing. Her mother did
not seek society, did not appear to require it. Nor did Hilda acutely feel
the lack of it. She could not define her need. All she knew was that
youth, moment by moment, was dropping down inexorably behind her.
And, still a child in heart and soul, she saw herself ageing, and then

aged, and then withered. Her twenty-first birthday was well above the
horizon. Soon, soon, she would be 'over twenty-one'! And she was not
yet born! That was it! She was not yet born! If the passionate strength
of desire could have done the miracle time would have stood still in the
heavens while Hilda sought the way of life.
And withal she was not wholly unhappy. Just as her attitude to her
mother was self-contradictory, so was her attitude towards existence.
Sometimes this profound infelicity of hers changed its hues for an
instant, and lo! it was bliss that she was bathed in. A phenomenon
which disconcerted her! She did not know that she had the most
precious of all faculties, the power to feel intensely.
III
Mr. Skellorn did not come; he was most definitely late.
From the window of her bedroom, at the front of the house, Hilda
looked westwards up toward the slopes of Chatterley Wood, where as a
child she used to go with other children to pick the sparse bluebells that
thrived on smoke. The bailiwick of Turnhill lay behind her; and all the
murky district of the Five Towns, of which Turnhill is the northern
outpost, lay to the south. At the foot of Chatterley Wood the canal
wound in large curves on its way towards the undefiled plains of
Cheshire and the sea. On the canal-side, exactly opposite to Hilda's
window, was a flour-mill, that sometimes made nearly as much smoke
as the kilns and chimneys closing the prospect on either hand. From the
flour-mill a bricked path, which separated a considerable row of new
cottages from their appurtenant gardens, led straight into Lessways
Street, in front of Mrs. Lessways' house. By this path Mr. Skellorn
should have arrived, for he inhabited the farthest of the cottages.
Hilda held Mr. Skellorn in disdain, as she held the row of cottages in
disdain. It seemed to her that Mr. Skellorn and the cottages
mysteriously resembled each other in their primness, their smugness,
their detestable self-complacency. Yet those cottages, perhaps thirty in
all, had stood for a great deal until Hilda, glancing at them, shattered
them with her scorn. The row was called Freehold Villas: a consciously

proud name in a district where much of the land was copyhold and
could only change owners subject to the payment of 'fines' and to the
feudal consent of a 'court' presided over by the agent of a lord of the
manor. Most of the dwellings were owned by their occupiers, who,
each an absolute monarch of the soil, niggled in his sooty garden of an
evening amid the flutter of drying shirts and towels. Freehold Villas
symbolized the final triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of
the prudent and industrious artisan. It corresponded with a Building
Society Secretary's dream of paradise. And indeed it was a very real
achievement. Nevertheless Hilda's irrational contempt would not admit
this. She saw in Freehold Villas nothing but narrowness (what long
narrow strips of gardens, and what narrow homes all flattened
together!), and uniformity, and brickiness, and polished brassiness, and
righteousness, and an eternal laundry.
From the upper floor of her own home she gazed destructively down
upon all that, and into the chill, crimson eye of the descending sun. Her
own home was not ideal, but it was better than all that. It was one of the
two middle houses of a detached terrace of four houses built by her
grandfather Lessways, the teapot manufacturer; it was the chief of the
four, obviously the habitation of the proprietor of the terrace. One of
the corner houses comprised a grocer's shop, and this house had been
robbed of its just proportion of garden so that the seigneurial
garden-plot might be triflingly larger than the others. The terrace was
not a terrace of cottages, but of houses rated at from twenty-six to
thirty-six pounds a year; beyond the means of artisans and petty
insurance agents and rent-collectors. And further, it was well built,
generously built; and its architecture, though debased, showed some
faint traces of Georgian amenity. It was admittedly the best row of
houses in that newly settled quarter of the town. In coming to