“Surely. You’re one of my bairns.”
Bennett kissed her. Then he went and posted his letter.
Annette came to meet him next day as he left his office. They had a long walk and were altogether happy, laughing and discovering little jokes that they could share—odd names on the shop-fronts, queer folk in the streets, strange advertisements on the placards. He left her near her home. He had so loved being alone with her that he had no wish to see her with her family. Also he was afraid of Minna. She spoiled everything.
Only one evening a week could Annette give to him, but they had Saturday afternoon and Sundays. She knew very little of the town, and, though he had little pride in it, it was a delight to him to show her such beauties as it had—the Zoological Gardens, the Art Gallery, the Reference Library, the School, the College, Humphrey Bodham’s Hospital, the parks, the elegant southern suburbs. They shared it all, and sharing made everything beautiful. Always he found her more wonderful. Her simple trust in him strengthened him, dissipated the mists and dark shadows of his mind, made him, what he had never been, a boy. He could laugh with her.
All the rest of his life seemed small and unimportant. Often at home he sang aloud and talked to himself until his mother rebuked him. Then he would atone by performing all sorts of little services for her. In the office he felt that the silly day’s work could be done in ten minutes—nine o’clock, work till a quarter past, send the whole world whizzing round, and then away to Annette. . . . But Annette’s days were long and laborious, and the presiding powers at the office demanded his attendance from nine till five. He found his work easier and quite interesting. He began dimly to perceive a purpose in its processes. Talk with one or two of the elder men enlightened him. A great deal of what they said seemed absurd to him. The world did not exist for business. It existed for Annette. He had a trembling desire to tell them so . . . One man told him that though immense fortunes had been made in the cotton trade, they were a mere trifle compared with the misery that had been created in the making of them. “But that,” said the man gloomily, “is the way of the world. It’s happened so often that nobody worries when it happens again. All business is dirty business. A man must live, though I can never understand why.” . . . Such pessimism seemed utterly absurd to Bennett. He did not want to understand why. He had only a general desire to be pleasant to everybody, and became so willing and busy and obliging that his superiors began to reverse their opinion of him. They had thought him conceited, reserved, and, at bottom, stupid. One of the senior clerks went out of his way to speak a few encouraging words to him. Such a thing had never happened before, and Bennett rushed away to Annette to tell her that the ball was at his feet, and he would quickly make his fortune, and then he would call for her one day, and they would be married by the bishop and for ever and ever they would live in a delicious dream. They were always making plans, and living in them, in a future that was so near the present as to be almost indistinguishable from it. There was no past. They ignored obstacles and impediments, lived in and for each other, and it seemed that it had always been so.
They hardly ever kissed each other in those young days. When they did so they set stirring in each other forces that instinctively they felt to be dangerous. What they had was so very precious, just the few hours every week of unclouded happiness. Always—wet or fine—they were out of doors, wandering blindly, oblivious of all else save each other. They would take meals in their pockets the more to be independent.
As the result of one long walk in the rain Annette fell ill and was in bed for a fortnight. She filled all Bennett’s thoughts. He dared not write to her, and only once was he bold enough to go and make enquiries of Minna. The outside world began to close in upon him and to insist that he should bring his image of his beloved into some more proportionate relation with it. Much of the glamour left her, but she was not the less precious to him. Rather more; but in a new way, a simpler way, more easy to grasp. His intelligence began to play about her, to appreciate her directness—(how marvellous that was compared with everything else that he had had!)—her honesty, her confiding loyalty, her skill in bending to his mood, and discarding everything that might interfere with their happiness. . . . Days of gold and summer sun, young, green days, all warm and busy with new life. . . . Then, one evening as he sat by the window of his attic, looking across the miles of roofs in the direction where she lay, she began to appear to him in yet another way. He harked back to the night of their first kiss, and he felt again the warmth of her body in its triumphant surrender. He was half terrified by the new flood of warmth that ran through him, and he put his hands over his eyes as if to shut out what he was seeing. He became wholly afraid and ran downstairs to seek company.
He turned to his religion and scourged himself with the most naïvely terrible thoughts of hell and damnation. This only had the effect of a bellows on hot iron: his imagination became white hot, and not Annette, but Woman obsessed him. Against that he could only set Annette and her love: the only pure threads of his life. He was sick and lean for love of her when he saw her again.
She was white and large-eyed. Her mother was present. He could only press her hand. How their two hands trembled as they touched!