The landlord knew that passers-by would not look higher up the façade than the ground-floor, and that therefore any magnificence above that level was merely wasted. The shop was in the occupation of a tea-dealer who gave away beautiful objects such as vases and useful objects such as tea-trays, to all purchasers. Ingpen's office, and a solicitor's office, were on the first floor, formerly the second; the third floor was the headquarters of the Hanbridge and District Ethical Society; the top floor was temporarily unlet, save for Ingpen's room. Nobody except Ingpen slept in the building, and he very irregularly.
The latchkey for the sidedoor was easy to choose in the glittering light of the latest triple-jetted and reflectored gaslamps which the corporation, to match the glories of the new town-hall, had placed in Crown Square. The lock, strange to say, worked easily. Edwin entered somewhat furtively, and as it were guiltily, though in Crown Square and the streets and the other squares visible therefrom, not a soul could be seen. The illuminated clock of the Old Town Hall at the top of the square showed twenty-five minutes to four. Immediately within the door began a new, very long and rather mean staircase, with which Edwin was acquainted. He closed the door, shutting out the light and the town, and struck a match in the empty building. He had walked into Hanbridge from Bursley, and as soon as he began to climb the stairs he was aware of great fatigue, both physical and mental. The calamity to Ingpen had almost driven Auntie Hamps out of his mind; it had not, however, driven Minnie out of his mind. He was gloomy and indignant on behalf of both Ingpen and Minnie. They were both victims. Minnie was undoubtedly a fool, and he was about to learn, perhaps, to what extent Ingpen had been a fool.
Each footstep sounded loud on the boards of deserted house. Having used several matches and arrived at the final staircase, Edwin wondered how he was to distinguish Ingpen's room there from the others without trying keys in all of them till he got to the right one. But on the top landing he had no difficulty, for Ingpen's card was fastened with a drawing-pin on to the first door he saw. A match burnt his fingers and expired just as he was shaking out a likely key from Ingpen's bunch. And then, in the black darkness, he perceived a line of light under the door in front of which he stood. He forgot his fatigue in an instant. His heart leaped. A burglar? Or had Ingpen left the gas burning? Ingpen could not have left the gas burning since, according to Albert Benbow, he had been in Bursley all afternoon. With precautions, and feeling very desperate and yet also craven, he lit a fresh match and managed quietly to open the door, which was not locked.
As soon as he beheld the illuminated interior of the room, all his skin crept and flushed as though he had taken a powerful stimulant. A girl reclined asleep in a small basket lounge-chair by the gas-fire. He could not see her face, which was turned towards the wall and away from the gas-jet that hung from the ceiling over an old desk; but she seemed slim and graceful, and there was something in the abandonment of unconsciousness that made her marvellously alluring. Her hat and gloves had been thrown on the desk, and a cloak lay on a chair. These coloured and intimate objects--extensions of the veritable personality of the girl--had the effect of delightfully completing the furniture of a room which was in fact rather bare. A narrow bed in the far corner, disguised under a green rug as a sofa; a green square of carpet, showing the unpolished boards at the sides; the desk, and three chairs; a primitive hanging wardrobe in another corner, hidden by a bulging linen curtain; a portmanteau; a few unframed prints on the walls; an alarm-clock on the mantelpiece,--there was nothing else in the chamber where Ingpen slept when it was too late, or he was too slack, to go to his proper home. But nothing else was needed. The scene was perfect; the girl rendered it so. And immense envy of, and admiration for, Ingpen surged through Edwin, who saw here the realisation of a dream that was to marriage what poetry is to prose. Ingpen might rail against women and against marriage in a manner exaggerated and indefensible; but he had at any rate known how to arrange his life and how to keep his own counsel. He had all the careless masculine freedom of his condition,--and in the background this exquisite phenomenon! The girl, her trustfulness, her abandonment, her secrecy, that white ear peeping out of her hair,--were his! It was staggering that such romance could exist in the Five Towns, of all places--for Edwin had the vague notion, common to all natives, that his own particular district fell short of full human nature in certain characteristics. For example, he could credit a human nature dying for love in Manchester, but never in the Five Towns. Even the occasional divorces that gave piquancy to life in the Five Towns seemed to lack the mysterious glamour of all other divorces.
He thought:
"Was it because he was expecting her that he sent me? Perhaps the desk was only a blind--and he couldn't tell me any more. Anyhow I shall have to break it to her."
He felt exceedingly awkward and unequal to the situation so startling in its novelty. Yet he did not wish himself away.
As timidly, hat in hand, he went forward into the room, the girl stirred and woke up, to the creaking of the chair.
"Oh! Tert!" she murmured between sleeping and waking.
Edwin did not like her voice. It reminded him of the voice of the nurse whom he had just left.