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From beyond that door came the voices of Arthur Dayson and the old clerk; Hilda lacked the courage to cross the length of the room and deliberately close it, and though Mr. Cannon did not seem inclined to move, his eyes followed the direction of hers and he must have divined her embarrassment. She knew not what to do. A crisis seemed to rise up monstrous between them, in an instant.
His attitude was that of the genuine bourgeois towards the artist: possessive, incurious, and contemptuous. Dayson, however, ignored George Cannon's attitude, perhaps did not even perceive what it was. He gloried in his performance.
Hilda could see, under her bent and frowning brow, his white hand moving on the dark expanse of his waistcoat. Immediately afterwards Mr. Cannon, interrupting, said: "That'll be all right. Finish it. I must be off." "Right you are!" said Dayson grandly. "I'll run down with it to the printer's myself soon as it's copied." Mr. Cannon nodded.
Hilda too must read it; her duty was to read it: Dayson had told her that she ought never to neglect the chance of reading any newspaper whatever, and that a young woman in her responsible situation could not possibly know too much. Which advice, though it came from a person ridiculous to her, seemed sound enough, and was in fact rather flattering.
That's to show it isn't the intelligent compositor's mistake, you see!" Then there was a familiar and masterful footstep on the stairs, and the attention of both of them wavered. Arthur Dayson and his proof-correcting lost all interest and all importance for Hilda as Mr. Cannon came into the room.
And there shone out from her soul a contempt for the miserable hack, so dazzling that it would have blinded him had he not been already blind. That evening she sat alone in the office. The first number of The Five Towns Chronicle, after the most astounding adventures, had miraculously gone to press. Dayson and Sowter had departed.
Enville, a member of the Local Board implicated in the said scandal. The proof was useless now, for the leader-page was made up. Nevertheless, Hilda carefully classified it "in case..." On a chair was The Daily Telegraph, which Dayson had evidently been reading, for it was blue pencilled.
Arthur Dayson, though a very good shorthand writer, and not without experience as a newspaper reporter and sub-editor, was a nincompoop. There could be no other explanation of his bland, complacent indifference as he sat poking at a coke stove one cold night of January, 1880, in full view of a most marvellous and ravishing spectacle.
The whole of her vital force was concentrated at the point of her pencil, and she seemed to be saying to herself: "I'm very sorry, mother, but see how important this is! I shall consider what I can do for you the very moment I am free." Arthur Dayson coughed and plumped heavily on a chair. It was in such moments as this that Dayson really lived, with all the force of his mediocrity.
Cannon read it over, and then Arthur Dayson borrowed the old clerk's vile pen and with the ceremonious delays due to his sense of his own importance, flourishingly added the signature. When she came forth she heard a knock at the outer door. "Come in," she commanded defiantly, for she was still unconsciously in the defiant mood in which she had offered the lying letter to Mr. Cannon.
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