Mr. Cannon1
i
A little later Hilda came downstairs dressed to go out. Her mother was lighting2 a glimmer3 of gas in the lobby. Ere Mrs. Lessways could descend4 from her tiptoes to her heels and turn round Hilda said quickly, forestalling5 curiosity:
“I’m going to get that thread you want. Just give me some money, will you?”
Nobody could have guessed from her placid6 tone and indifferent demeanour that she was in a state of extreme agitation7. But so it was. Suddenly, after kissing her mother in the kitchen, she had formed a tremendous resolve. And in a moment the resolve had possessed8 her, sending her flying upstairs, and burning her into a fever, as with the assured movements of familiarity she put on her bonnet9, mantle10, ‘fall,’ and gloves in the darkness of the chamber11. She held herself in leash12 while her mother lifted a skirt and found a large loaded pocket within and a purse in the pocket and a sixpence in the purse. But when she had shut the door on all that interior haunted by her mother’s restlessness, when she was safe in the porch and in the windy obscurity of the street, she yielded with voluptuous13 apprehension14 to a thrill that shook her.
“I might have tidied my hair,” she thought. “Pooh! What does my hair matter?”
Her mind was full of an adventure through which she had passed seven years previously15, when she was thirteen and a little girl at school. For several days, then, she had been ruthlessly mortifying16 her mother by complaints about the meals. Her fastidious appetite could not be suited. At last, one noon when the child had refused the whole of a plenteous dinner, Mrs. Lessways had burst into tears and, slapping four pennies down on the table, had cried, “Here! I fairly give you up! Go out and buy your own dinner! Then perhaps you’ll get what you want!” And the child, without an instant’s hesitation17, had seized the coins and gone out, hatless, and bought food at a little tripe-shop that was also an eating-house, and consumed it there; and then in grim silence returned home. Both mother and daughter had been stupefied and frightened by the boldness of the daughter’s initiative, by her amazing, flaunting18 disregard of filial decency19. Mrs. Lessways would not have related the episode to anybody upon any consideration whatever. It was a shameful20 secret, never even referred to. But Mrs. Lessways had unmistakably though indirectly21 referred to it when in anger she had said to her daughter aged22 twenty: “I suppose her ladyship will be consulting her own lawyer next!” Hilda had understood, and that was why she had blushed.
And now, as she turned from Lessways Street into the Oldcastle Road, on her way to the centre of the town, she experienced almost exactly the intense excitement of the reckless and supercilious23 child in quest of its dinner. The only difference was that the recent reconciliation24 had inspired her with a certain negligent25 compassion26 for her mother, with a curious tenderness that caused her to wonder at herself.
ii
The Market Square of Turnhill was very large for the size of the town. The diminutive27 town hall, which in reality was nothing but a watch-house, seemed to be a mere28 incident on its irregular expanse, to which the two-storey shops and dwellings29 made a low border. Behind this crimson30, blue-slated border rose the loftier forms of a church and a large chapel31, situate in adjacent streets. The square was calm and almost deserted32 in the gloom. It typified the slow tranquillity33 of the bailiwick, which was removed from the central life of the Five Towns, and unconnected therewith by even a tram or an omnibus. Only within recent years had Turnhill got so much as a railway station—rail-head of a branch line. Turnhill was the extremity34 of civilization in those parts. Go northwards out of this Market Square, and you would soon find yourself amid the wild and hilly moorlands, sprinkled with iron-and-coal villages whose red-flaming furnaces illustrated35 the eternal damnation which was the chief article of their devout36 religious belief. And in the Market Square not even the late edition of the Staffordshire Signal was cried, though it was discreetly37 on sale with its excellent sporting news in a few shops. In the hot and malodorous candle-lit factories, where the real strenuous38 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 mediation39 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 withdrawn40 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 miraculously41 achieved leisureliness42. 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, Solicitor43.” 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 solicitors44. She did not know Mr. Q. Karkeek by sight, nor even whether he was old or young, married or single, agreeable or repulsive45.
The side entrance gave directly on to a long flight of naked stairs, and up these stairs Hilda climbed into the unknown, towards the redoubtable46 and the perilous47. “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 glazed48 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-aged49 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 folly50 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 battered51 and littered desk, just under a gas-jet. He spoke52 low, like a conspirator53, 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 agonized54.
“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 misgivings55, “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 unfamiliar56 and alarming. Perhaps it was a pity that her mother had unsuspectingly put the scheme into her head!
However, the deed was done. Hilda generally acted first and reflected afterwards. She was frightened, but rather by the unknown than by anything she could define.
“You’ve come about the property?” said Mr. Cannon amiably57, in a matter-of-fact tone.
He had deep black eyes, and black hair, like Hilda’s; good, regular teeth, and a clear complexion58; perhaps his nose was rather large, but it was straight. With his large pale hands he occasionally stroked his long soft moustache; the chin was blue. He was smartly dressed in dark blue; he had a beautiful neck-tie, and the genuine whiteness of his wristbands was remarkable59 in a district where starched60 linen61 was usually either grey or bluish. He was not a dandy, but he respected his person; he evidently gave careful attention to his body; and this trait alone set him apart among the citizens of Turnhill.
“Yes,” said Hilda. She thought: “He’s a very handsome man! How strange I don’t remember seeing him in the streets!” She was in awe62 of him. He was indefinitely older than herself; and she felt like a child, out of place in the easy-chair.
“I suppose it’s about the rent-collecting?” he pursued.
“Yes—it is,” she answered, astonished that he could thus divine her purpose. “I mean—”
“What does your mother want to do?”
“Oh!” said Hilda, speaking low. “It’s not mother. I’ve come to consult you myself. Mother doesn’t know. I’m nearly twenty-one, and it’s really my property, you know!” She blushed with shame.
“Ah!” he exclaimed. He tried to disguise his astonishment63 in an easy, friendly smile. But he was most obviously startled. He looked at Hilda in a different way, with a much intensified64 curiosity.
“Yes,” she resumed. He now seemed to her more like a fellow-creature, and less like a member of the inimical older generation.
“So you’re nearly twenty-one?”
“In December,” she said. “And I think under my father’s will—” She stopped, at a loss. “The fact is, I don’t think mother will be quite able to look after the property properly, and I’m afraid—you see, now that Mr. Skellorn has had this stroke—”
“Yes,” said Mr. Cannon, “I heard about that, and I was thinking perhaps Mrs. Lessways had sent you.... We collect rents, you know.”
“I see!” Hilda murmured. “Well, the truth is, mother hasn’t the slightest idea I’m here. Not the slightest! And I wouldn’t hurt her feelings for anything.” He nodded sympathetically. “But I thought something ought to be done. She’s decided65 to collect our Calder Street rents herself, and she isn’t fitted to do it. And then there’s the question of the repairs.... I know the rents are going down. I expect it’s all mother’s for life, but I want there to be something left for me when she’s gone, you see! And if—I’ve never seen the will. I suppose there’s no way of seeing a copy of it, somewhere?... I can’t very well ask mother again.”
“I know all about the will,” said Mr. Cannon.
“You do?”
Wondrous66, magical man!
“Yes,” he explained. “I used to be at Toms and Scoles’s. I was there when it was made. I copied it.”
“Really!” She felt that he would save her, not only from any possible unpleasant consequences of her escapade, but also from suffering ultimate loss by reason of her mother’s foolishness.
“You’re quite right,” he continued. “I remember it perfectly67. Your mother is what we call tenant-for-life; everything goes to you in the end.”
“Well,” Hilda asked abruptly68. “All I want to know is, what I can do.”
“Of course, without upsetting your mother?”
He glanced at her. She blushed again.
“Naturally,” she said coldly.
“You say you think the property is going down—it is, everybody knows that—and your mother thinks of collecting the rents herself.... Well, young lady, it’s very difficult, very difficult, your mother being the trustee and executor.”
“Yes, that’s what she’s always saying—she’s the trustee and executor.”
“You’d better let me think it over for a day or two.”
“And shall I call in again?”
“You might slip in if you’re passing. I’ll see what can be done. Of course it would never do for you to have any difficulty with your mother.”
“Oh no!” she concurred69 vehemently70. “Anything would be better than that. But I thought there was no harm in me—”
“Certainly not.”
She had a profound confidence in him. And she was very content so far with the result of her adventure.
“I hope nobody will find out I’ve been here,” she said timidly. “Because if it did get to mother’s ears—”
“Nobody will find out,” he reassured71 her.
Assuredly his influence was tranquillizing. Even while he insisted on the difficulties of the situation, he seemed to be smoothing them away. She was convinced that he would devise some means of changing her mother’s absurd purpose and of strengthening her own position. But when, at the end of the interview, he came round the large table which separated them, and she rose and looked up at him, close, she was suddenly very afraid of him. He was a tall and muscular man, and he stood like a monarch72, and she stood like a child. And his gesture seemed to say: “Yes, I know you are afraid. And I rather like you to be afraid. But I am benevolent73 in the exercise of my power.” Under his gaze, her gaze fastened on the wire-blind and the dark window, and she read off the reversed letters on the blind.
Like a mouse she escaped to the stairs. She was happy and fearful and expectant.... It was done! She had consulted a lawyer! She was astounded74 at herself.
In the Market Square it was now black night. She looked shyly up at the lighted wire-blinds over the ironmongery. “I was there!” she said. “He is still there.” The whole town, the whole future, seemed to be drenched75 now in romance. Nevertheless, the causes of her immense discontent had not apparently76 been removed nor in any way modified.
收听单词发音 |
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cannon
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| n.大炮，火炮；飞机上的机关炮 | |
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lighting
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| n.照明，光线的明暗，舞台灯光 | |
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glimmer
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| v.发出闪烁的微光；n.微光，微弱的闪光 | |
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descend
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| vt./vi.传下来，下来，下降 | |
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forestalling
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| v.先发制人，预先阻止( forestall的现在分词 ) | |
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placid
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| adj.安静的，平和的 | |
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agitation
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| n.搅动；搅拌；鼓动，煽动 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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bonnet
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| n.无边女帽；童帽 | |
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mantle
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| n.斗篷，覆罩之物，罩子；v.罩住，覆盖，脸红 | |
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chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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leash
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| n.牵狗的皮带，束缚；v.用皮带系住 | |
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voluptuous
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| adj.肉欲的，骄奢淫逸的 | |
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apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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mortifying
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| adj.抑制的，苦修的v.使受辱( mortify的现在分词 )；伤害（人的感情）；克制；抑制（肉体、情感等） | |
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hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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flaunting
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| adj.招摇的，扬扬得意的，夸耀的v.炫耀，夸耀( flaunt的现在分词 )；有什么能耐就施展出来 | |
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decency
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| n.体面，得体，合宜，正派，庄重 | |
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shameful
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| adj.可耻的，不道德的 | |
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indirectly
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| adv.间接地，不直接了当地 | |
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aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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supercilious
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| adj.目中无人的，高傲的；adv.高傲地；n.高傲 | |
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reconciliation
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| n.和解，和谐，一致 | |
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negligent
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| adj.疏忽的；玩忽的；粗心大意的 | |
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compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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diminutive
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| adj.小巧可爱的，小的 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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dwellings
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| n.住处，处所( dwelling的名词复数 ) | |
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crimson
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| n./adj.深(绯)红色(的)；vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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chapel
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| n.小教堂，殡仪馆 | |
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deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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tranquillity
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| n. 平静, 安静 | |
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extremity
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| n.末端，尽头；尽力；终极；极度 | |
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illustrated
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| adj. 有插图的，列举的 动词illustrate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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devout
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| adj.虔诚的，虔敬的，衷心的 (n.devoutness) | |
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discreetly
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| ad.(言行)审慎地，慎重地 | |
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strenuous
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| adj.奋发的，使劲的；紧张的；热烈的，狂热的 | |
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mediation
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| n.调解 | |
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withdrawn
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| vt.收回；使退出；vi.撤退，退出 | |
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miraculously
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| ad.奇迹般地 | |
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leisureliness
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| n.悠然，从容 | |
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solicitor
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| n.初级律师，事务律师 | |
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solicitors
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| 初级律师( solicitor的名词复数 ) | |
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repulsive
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| adj.排斥的，使人反感的 | |
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redoubtable
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| adj.可敬的；可怕的 | |
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perilous
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| adj.危险的，冒险的 | |
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glazed
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| adj.光滑的，像玻璃的；上过釉的；呆滞无神的v.装玻璃( glaze的过去式)；上釉于，上光；（目光）变得呆滞无神 | |
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middle-aged
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| adj.中年的 | |
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folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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conspirator
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| n.阴谋者，谋叛者 | |
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agonized
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| v.使（极度）痛苦，折磨( agonize的过去式和过去分词 )；苦斗；苦苦思索；感到极度痛苦 | |
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misgivings
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| n.疑虑，担忧，害怕；疑虑，担心，恐惧( misgiving的名词复数 )；疑惧 | |
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unfamiliar
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| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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amiably
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| adv.和蔼可亲地，亲切地 | |
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complexion
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| n.肤色；情况，局面；气质，性格 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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starched
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| adj.浆硬的，硬挺的，拘泥刻板的v.把（衣服、床单等）浆一浆( starch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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intensified
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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wondrous
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| adj.令人惊奇的，奇妙的；adv.惊人地；异乎寻常地；令人惊叹地 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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concurred
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| 同意（concur的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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vehemently
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| adv. 热烈地 | |
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reassured
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| adj.使消除疑虑的；使放心的v.再保证，恢复信心( reassure的过去式和过去分词) | |
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monarch
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| n.帝王，君主，最高统治者 | |
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73
benevolent
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| adj.仁慈的，乐善好施的 | |
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astounded
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| v.使震惊(astound的过去式和过去分词)；愕然；愕；惊讶 | |
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75
drenched
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| adj.湿透的；充满的v.使湿透( drench的过去式和过去分词 )；在某人（某物）上大量使用（某液体） | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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