Hilda Lessways | Page 8

sale with its
excellent sporting news in a few shops. In the hot and malodorous
candle-lit factories, where the real strenuous life of the town would
remain cooped up for another half-hour of the evening, men and
women had yet scarcely taken to horse-racing; they would gamble upon
rabbits, cocks, pigeons, and their own fists, without the mediation of
the Signal. The one noise in the Market Square was the bell of a hawker
selling warm pikelets at a penny each for the high tea of the tradesmen.
The hawker was a deathless institution, a living proof that withdrawn
Turnhill would continue always to be exactly what it always had been.
Still, to the east of the Square, across the High Street, a vast space was
being cleared of hovels for the erection of a new town hall daringly
magnificent.
Hilda crossed the Square, scorning it.
She said to herself: "I'd better get the thing over before I buy the thread.
I should never be able to stand Miss Dayson's finicking! I should
scream out!" But the next instant, with her passion for proving to
herself how strong she could be, she added: "Well, I just will buy the
thread first!" And she went straight into Dayson's little fancy shop,
which was full of counter and cardboard boxes and Miss Dayson, and
stayed therein for at least five minutes, emerging with a miraculously
achieved leisureliness. A few doors away was a somewhat new
building, of three storeys--the highest in the Square. The ground floor
was an ironmongery; it comprised also a side entrance, of which the
door was always open. This side entrance showed a brass-plate, "Q.
Karkeek, Solicitor." And the wire-blinds of the two windows of the
first floor also bore the words: "Q. Karkeek, Solicitor. Q. Karkeek,
Solicitor." The queerness of the name had attracted Hilda's attention
several years earlier, when the signs were fresh. It was an accident that
she had noticed it; she had not noticed the door-plates or the
wire-blinds of other solicitors. She did not know Mr. Q. Karkeek by
sight, nor even whether he was old or young, married or single,
agreeable or repulsive.

The side entrance gave directly on to a long flight of naked stairs, and
up these stairs Hilda climbed into the unknown, towards the
redoubtable and the perilous. "I'm bound to be seen," she said to herself,
"but I don't care, and I _don't_ care!" At the top of the stairs was a
passage, at right angles, and then a glazed door with the legend in black
letters, "Q. Karkeek, Solicitor," and two other doors mysteriously
labelled "Private." She opened the glazed door, and saw a dirty
middle-aged man on a stool, and she said at once to him, in a harsh,
clear, deliberate voice, without giving herself time to reflect:
"I want to see Mr. Karkeek."
The man stared at her sourly, as if bewildered.
She said to herself: "I shan't be able to stand this excitement much
longer."
"You can't see Mr. Karkeek," said the man. "Mr. Karkeek's detained at
Hanbridge County Court. But if you're in such a hurry like, you'd better
see Mr. Cannon. It's Mr. Cannon as they generally do see. Who d'ye
come from, miss?"
"Come from?" Hilda repeated, unnerved.
"What name?"
She had not expected this. "I suppose I shall have to tell him!" she said
to herself, and aloud: "Lessways."
"Oh! Ah!" exclaimed the man. "Bless us! Yes!" It was as if he had said:
"Of course it's Lessways! And don't I know all about _you!_" And
Hilda was overwhelmed by the sense of the enormity of the folly which
she was committing.
The man swung half round on his stool, and seized the end of an
india-rubber tube which hung at the side of the battered and littered
desk, just under a gas-jet. He spoke low, like a conspirator, into the
mouthpiece of the tube. "Miss Lessways--to see you, sir." Then very

quickly he clapped the tube to his ear and listened. And then he put it to
his mouth again and repeated: "Lessways." Hilda was agonized.
"I'll ask ye to step this way, miss," said the man, slipping off his stool.
At the same time he put a long inky penholder, which he had been
holding in his wrinkled right hand, between his teeth.
"Never," thought Hilda as she followed the clerk, in a whirl of horrible
misgivings, "never have I done anything as mad as this before! I'm
under twenty-one!"
III
There she was at last, seated in front of a lawyer in a lawyer's
office--her ladyship consulting her own lawyer! It seemed incredible! A
few minutes ago she had been at home, and now she was in a world
unfamiliar and alarming. Perhaps it was a pity that her