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+Project Gutenberg's The Grim Smile of the Five Towns, by Arnold Bennett
+#4 in our series by Arnold Bennett
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+Title: The Grim Smile of the Five Towns
+
+Author: Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: December, 2003 [Etext #4734]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 10, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG ETEXT THE GRIM SMILE OF THE FIVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks 
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+THE GRIM SMILE OF THE FIVE TOWNS
+
+ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+
+
+
+     To my old and constant friend
+             JOSEPH DAWSON
+      a student profoundly versed
+        in the human nature of
+            the Five Towns
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+The Lion's Share
+Baby's Bath
+The Silent Brothers
+The Nineteenth Hat
+Vera's First Christmas Adventure
+The Murder of the Mandarin
+Vera's Second Christmas Adventure
+The Burglary
+News of the Engagement
+Beginning the New Year
+From One Generation to Another
+The Death of Simon Fuge
+In a New Bottle
+
+
+
+
+THE LION'S SHARE
+
+I
+
+
+In the Five Towns the following history is related by those who
+know it as something side-splittingly funny--as one of the best
+jokes that ever occurred in a district devoted to jokes. And I,
+too, have hitherto regarded it as such. But upon my soul, now that
+I come to write it down, it strikes me as being, after all, a
+pretty grim tragedy. However, you shall judge, and laugh or cry as
+you please.
+
+It began in the little house of Mrs Carpole, up at Bleakridge, on
+the hill between Bursley and Hanbridge. Mrs Carpole was the second
+Mrs Carpole, and her husband was dead. She had a stepson, Horace,
+and a son of her own, Sidney. Horace is the hero, or the villain,
+of the history. On the day when the unfortunate affair began he
+was nineteen years old, and a model youth. Not only was he getting
+on in business, not only did he give half his evenings to the
+study of the chemistry of pottery and the other half to various
+secretaryships in connection with the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel
+and Sunday-school, not only did he save money, not only was he a
+comfort to his stepmother and a sort of uncle to Sidney, not only
+was he an early riser, a total abstainer, a non-smoker, and a good
+listener; but, in addition to the practice of these manifold and
+rare virtues, he found time, even at that tender age, to pay his
+tailor's bill promptly and to fold his trousers in the same crease
+every night--so that he always looked neat and dignified. Strange
+to say, he made no friends. Perhaps he was just a thought too
+perfect for a district like the Five Towns; a sin or so might have
+endeared him to the entire neighbourhood. Perhaps his loneliness
+was due to his imperfect sense of humour, or perhaps to the dull,
+unsmiling heaviness of his somewhat flat features.
+
+Sidney was quite a different story. Sidney, to use his mother's
+phrase, was a little jockey. His years were then eight. Fair-
+haired and blue-eyed, as most little jockeys are, he had a smile
+and a scowl that were equally effective in tyrannizing over both
+his mother and Horace, and he was beloved by everybody. Women
+turned to look at him in the street. Unhappily, his health was not
+good. He was afflicted by a slight deafness, which, however, the
+doctor said he would grow out of; the doctor predicted for him a
+lusty manhood. In the meantime, he caught every disease that
+happened to be about, and nearly died of each one. His latest
+acquisition had been scarlet fever. Now one afternoon, after he
+had 'peeled' and his room had been disinfected, and he was
+beginning to walk again, Horace came home and decided that Sidney
+should be brought downstairs for tea as a treat, to celebrate his
+convalescence, and that he, Horace, would carry him downstairs.
+Mrs Carpole was delighted with the idea, and Sidney also, except
+that Sidney did not want to be carried downstairs--he wanted to
+walk down.
+
+'I think it will be better for him to walk, Horace dear,' said Mrs
+Carpole, in her thin, plaintive voice. 'He can, quite well. And
+you know how clumsy you are. Supposing you were to fall!'
+
+Horace, nevertheless, in pursuance of his programme of being uncle
+to Sidney, was determined to carry Sidney. And carry Sidney he
+did, despite warnings and kickings. At least he carried him as far
+as the turn in the steep stairs, at which point he fell, just as
+his stepmother had feared, and Sidney with him. The half-brothers
+arrived on the ground floor in company, but Horace, with his
+eleven stone two, was on top, and the poor suffering little
+convalescent lay moveless and insensible.
+
+It took the doctor forty minutes to bring him to, and all the time
+the odour of grilled herrings, which formed part of the uneaten
+tea, made itself felt through the house like a Satanic comment on
+the spectacle of human life. The scene was dreadful at first. The
+agony then passed. There were no bruises on the boy, not a mark,
+and in a couple of hours he seemed to be perfectly himself. Horace
+breathed again, and thanked Heaven it was no worse. His gratitude
+to Heaven was, however, slightly premature, for in the black
+middle of the night poor Sidney was seized with excruciating pains
+in the head, and the doctor lost four hours' sleep. These pains
+returned at intervals of a few days, and naturally the child's
+convalescence was retarded. Then Horace said that Airs Carpole
+should take Sidney to Buxton for a fortnight, and he paid all the
+expenses of the trip out of his savings. He was desolated, utterly
+stricken; he said he should never forgive himself. Sidney
+improved, slowly.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+After several months, during which Horace had given up all his
+limited spare time to the superintendence of the child's first
+steps in knowledge, Sidney was judged to be sufficiently strong to
+go to school, and it was arranged that he should attend the
+Endowed School at the Wedgwood Institution. Horace accompanied him
+thither on the opening day of the term--it was an inclement
+morning in January--and left the young delicate sprig, apparently
+joyous and content, to the care of his masters and the mercy of
+his companions. But Sidney came home for dinner weeping--weeping
+in spite of his new mortar-board cap, his new satchel, his new box
+of compasses, and his new books. His mother kept him at home in
+the afternoon, and by the evening another of those terrible
+attacks had supervened. The doctor and Horace and Mrs Carpole once
+more lost much precious sleep. The mysterious malady continued.
+School was out of the question.
+
+And when Sidney took the air, in charge of his mother, everybody
+stopped to sympathize with him and to stroke his curls and call
+him a poor dear, and also to commiserate Mrs Carpole. As for
+Horace, Bursley tried to feel sorry for Horace, but it only
+succeeded in showing Horace that it was hiding a sentiment of
+indignation against him. Each friendly face as it passed Horace in
+the street said, without words, 'There goes the youth who probably
+ruined his young stepbrother's life. And through sheer obstinacy
+too! He dropped the little darling in spite of warnings and
+protests, and then fell on the top of him. Of course, he didn't do
+it on purpose, but--'
+
+The doctor mentioned Greatorex of Manchester, the celebrated brain
+specialist. And Horace took Sidney to Manchester. They had to wait
+an hour and a quarter to see Greatorex, his well-known consulting-
+rooms in John Dalton Street being crowded with imperfect brains;
+but their turn came at last, and they found themselves in
+Greatorex's presence. Greatorex was a fat man, with the voice of a
+thin man, who seemed to spend the whole of his career in the care
+of his fingernails.
+
+'Well, my little fellow,' said Greatorex, 'don't cry.' (For Sidney
+was already crying.) And then to Horace, in a curt tone: 'What is
+it?'
+
+And Horace was obliged to humiliate himself and relate the
+accident in detail, together with all that had subsequently
+happened.
+
+'Yes, yes, yes, yes!' Greatorex would punctuate the recital, and
+when tired of 'yes' he would say 'Hum, hum, hum, hum!'
+
+When he had said 'hum' seventy-two times he suddenly remarked that
+his fee was three guineas, and told Horace to strengthen Sidney
+all he could, not to work him too hard, and to bring him back in a
+year's time.
+
+Horace paid the money, Greatorex emitted a final 'hum', and then
+the stepbrothers were whisked out by an expeditious footman. The
+experience cost Horace over four pounds and the loss of a day's
+time. And the worst was that Sidney had a violent attack that very
+night.
+
+School being impossible for him, Sidney had intermittent
+instruction from professors of both sexes at home. But he learnt
+practically nothing except the banjo. Horace had to buy him a
+banjo: it cost the best part of a ten-pound note; still, Horace
+could do no less. Sidney's stature grew rapidly; his general
+health certainly improved, yet not completely; he always had a
+fragile, interesting air. Moreover, his deafness did not
+disappear: there were occasions when it was extremely pronounced.
+And he was never quite safe from these attacks in the head. He
+spent a month or six weeks each year in the expensive bracing
+atmosphere of some seaside resort, and altogether he was decidedly
+a heavy drain on Horace's resources. People were aware of this,
+and they said that Horace ought to be happy that he was in a
+position to spend money freely on his poor brother. Had not the
+doctor predicted, before the catastrophe due to Horace's culpable
+negligence, that Sidney would grow into a strong man, and that his
+deafness would leave him? The truth was, one never knew the end of
+those accidents in infancy! Further, was not Sidney's sad
+condition slowly killing his mother? It was whispered about that,
+since the disaster, Sidney had not been QUITE sound mentally. Was
+not the mere suspicion of this enough to kill any mother?
+
+And, as a fact, Mrs Carpole did die. She died of quinsy, doubtless
+aggravated by Sidney's sad condition.
+
+Not long afterwards Horace came into a small fortune from his
+maternal grandfather. But poor Sidney did not come into any
+fortune, and people somehow illogically inferred that Horace had
+not behaved quite nicely in coming into a fortune while his
+suffering invalid brother, whom he had so deeply harmed, came into
+nothing. Even Horace had compunctions due to the visitations of a
+similar idea. And with part of the fortune he bought a house with
+a large garden up at Toft End, the highest hill of the hilly Five
+Towns, so that Sidney might have the benefit of the air. He also
+engaged a housekeeper and servants. With the remainder of the
+fortune he obtained a partnership in the firm of earthenware
+manufacturers for whom he had been acting as highly-paid manager.
+
+Sidney reached the age of eighteen, and was most effective to look
+upon, his bright hair being still curly, and his eyes a wondrous
+blue, and his form elegant; and the question of Sidney's future
+arose. His health was steadily on the up grade. The deafness had
+quite disappeared. He had inclinations towards art, and had
+already amused himself by painting some beautiful vases. So it was
+settled that he should enter Horace's works on the art side, with
+a view to becoming, ultimately, art director. Horace gave him
+three pounds a week, in order that he might feel perfectly
+independent, and, to the same end, Sidney paid Horace seven-and-
+sixpence a week for board and lodging. But the change of life
+upset the youth's health again. After only two visits to the works
+he had a grave recurrence of the head-attacks, and he was solemnly
+exhorted not to apply himself too closely to business. He
+therefore took several half-holidays a week, and sometimes a whole
+one. And even when he put in one of his full days he would arrive
+at the works three hours after Horace, and restore the balance by
+leaving an hour earlier. The entire town watched over him as a
+mother watches over a son. The notion that he was not QUITE right
+in the pate gradually died away, and everybody was thankful for
+that, though it was feared an untimely grave might be his portion.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+She was a nice girl: the nicest girl that Horace had ever met
+with, because her charming niceness included a faculty of being
+really serious about serious things--and yet she could be
+deliciously gay. In short, she was a revelation to Horace. And her
+name was Ella, and she had come one year to spend some weeks with
+Mrs Penkethman, the widowed headmistress of the Wesleyan Day
+School, who was her cousin. Mrs Penkethman and Ella had been
+holidaying together in France; their arrival in Bursley naturally
+coincided with the reopening of the school in August for the
+autumn term.
+
+Now at this period Horace was rather lonely in his large house and
+garden; for Sidney, in pursuit of health, had gone off on a six
+weeks' cruise round Holland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, in one
+of those Atlantic liners which, translated like Enoch without
+dying, become in their old age 'steam-yachts', with fine names apt
+to lead to confusion with the private yacht of the Tsar of Russia.
+Horace had offered him the trip, and Horace was also paying his
+weekly salary as usual.
+
+So Horace, who had always been friendly with Mrs Penkethman, grew
+now more than ever friendly with Mrs Penkethman. And Mrs
+Penkethman and Ella were inseparable. The few aristocrats left in
+Bursley in September remarked that Horace knew what he was about,
+as it was notorious that Ella had the most solid expectations. But
+as a matter of fact Horace did not know what he was about, and he
+never once thought of Ella's expectations. He was simply, as they
+say in Bursley, knocked silly by Ella. He honestly imagined her to
+be the wonderfullest woman on the earth's surface, with her dark
+eyes and her expressive sympathetic gestures, and her alterations
+of seriousness and gaiety. It astounded him that a girl of twenty-
+one could have thought so deeply upon life as she had. The
+inexplicable thing was that she looked up to HIM. She evidently
+admired HIM. He wanted to tell her that she was quite wrong about
+him, much too kind in her estimate of him--that really he was a
+very ordinary man indeed. But another instinct prevented him from
+thus undeceiving her.
+
+And one Saturday afternoon, the season being late September,
+Horace actually got those two women up to tea in his house and
+garden. He had not dared to dream of such bliss. He had hesitated
+long before asking them to come, and in asking them he had blushed
+and stammered: the invitation had seemed to him to savour of
+audacity. But, bless you! they had accepted with apparent ecstasy.
+They gave him to think that they had genuinely wanted to come. And
+they came extra-specially dressed--visions, lilies of the field.
+And as the day was quite warm, tea was served in the garden, and
+everybody admired the view; and there was no restraint, no
+awkwardness. In particular Ella talked with an ease and a
+distinction that enchanted Horace, and almost made him talk with
+ease and distinction too. He said to himself that, seeing he had
+only known her a month, he was getting on amazingly. He said to
+himself that his good luck passed belief.
+
+Then there was a sound of cab-wheels on the other side of the
+garden-wall, and presently Horace heard the housekeeper
+complimenting Sidney on his good looks, and Sidney asking the
+housekeeper to lend him three shillings to pay the cabman. The
+golden youth had returned without the slightest warning from his
+cruise. The tea trio, at the lower end of the garden, saw him
+standing in the porch, tanned, curly, graceful, and young. Horace
+half rose, and then sat down again. Ella stared hard.
+
+'That must be your brother,' she said.
+
+'Yes, that's Sid,' Horace answered; and then, calling out loudly:
+'Come down here, Sid, and tell them to bring another cup and
+saucer.'
+
+'Right you are, old man,' Sidney shouted. 'You see I'm back. What!
+Mrs Penkethman, is that you?' He came down the central path of the
+garden like a Narcissus.
+
+'He DOES look delicate,' said Ella under her breath to Horace.
+Tears came to her eyes.
+
+Naturally Ella knew all about Sidney. She enjoyed the entire
+confidence of Mrs Penkethman, and what Mrs Penkethman didn't know
+of the private history of the upper classes in Bursley did not
+amount to very much.
+
+These were nearly the last words that Ella spoke to Horace that
+afternoon. The introduction was made, and Sidney slipped into the
+party as comfortably as he slipped into everything, like a candle
+slipping into a socket. But nevertheless Ella talked no more. She
+just stared at Sidney, and listened to him. Horace was proud that
+Sidney had made such an impression on her; he was glad that she
+showed no aversion to Sidney, because, in the event of Horace's
+marriage, where would Sidney live, if not with Horace and Horace's
+wife? Still, he could have wished that Ella would continue to
+display her conversational powers.
+
+Presently, Sidney lighted a cigarette. He was of those young men
+whose delicate mouths seem to have been fashioned for the nice
+conduct of a cigarette. And he had a way of blowing out the smoke
+that secretly ravished every feminine beholder. Horace still held
+to his boyhood's principles; but he envied Sidney a little.
+
+At the conclusion of the festivity these two women naturally could
+not be permitted to walk home alone. And, naturally, also, the
+four could not walk abreast on the narrow pavements. Horace went
+first with Mrs Penkethman. He was mad with anxiety to appropriate
+Ella, but he dared not. It would not have been quite correct; it
+would have been, as they say in Bursley, too thick. Besides, there
+was the question of age. Horace was over thirty, and Mrs
+Penkethman was also--over thirty; whereas Sidney was twenty-one,
+and so was Ella. Hence Sidney walked behind with Ella, and the
+procession started in silence. Horace did not look round too
+often--that would not have been quite proper--but whenever he did
+look round the other couple had lagged farther and farther behind,
+and Ella seemed perfectly to have recovered her speech. At length
+he looked round, and lo! they had not turned the last corner; and
+they arrived at Mrs Penkethman's cottage at Hillport a quarter of
+an hour after their elders.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The wedding cost Horace a large sum of money. You see, he could
+not do less than behave handsomely by the bride, owing to his
+notorious admiration for her; and of course the bridegroom needed
+setting up. Horace practically furnished their home for them out
+of his own pocket; it was not to be expected that Sidney should
+have resources. Further, Sidney as a single man, paying seven-and-
+six a week for board and lodging, could no doubt struggle along
+upon three pounds weekly. But Sidney as a husband, with the nicest
+girl in the world to take care of, and house-rent to pay, could
+not possibly perform the same feat. Although he did no more work
+at the manufactory--Horace could not have been so unbrotherly as
+to demand it--Horace paid him eight pounds a week instead of
+three.
+
+And the affair cost Horace a good deal besides money. But what
+could Horace do? He decidedly would not have wished to wreck the
+happiness of two young and beautiful lives, even had he possessed
+the power to do so. And he did not possess the power. Those two
+did not consult Horace before falling in love. They merely fell in
+love, and there was an end of it--and an end of Horace too! Horace
+had to suffer. He did suffer.
+
+Perhaps it was for his highest welfare that other matters came to
+monopolize his mind. One sorrow drives out another. If you sit on
+a pin you are apt to forget that you have the toothache. The
+earthenware manufactory was not going well. Plenty of business was
+being done, but not at the right prices. Crushed between the upper
+and nether millstones of the McKinley Tariff and German
+competition, Horace, in company with other manufacturers, was
+breathing out his life's blood in the shape of capital. The truth
+was that he had never had enough capital. He had heavily mortgaged
+the house at Toft End in order to purchase his partners' shares in
+the business and have the whole undertaking to himself, and he
+profoundly regretted it. He needed every penny that he could
+collect; the strictest economy was necessary if he meant to
+survive the struggle. And here he was paying eight pounds a week
+to a personage purely ornamental, after having squandered hundreds
+in rendering that personage comfortable! The situation was
+dreadful.
+
+You may ask, Why did he not explain the situation to Sidney? Well,
+partly because he was too kind, and partly because he was too
+proud, and partly because Sidney would not have understood. Horace
+fought on, keeping up a position in the town and hoping that
+miracles would occur.
+
+Then Ella's expectations were realized. Sidney and she had some
+twenty thousand pounds to play with. And they played the most
+agreeable games. But not in Bursley. No. They left Horace in
+Bursley and went to Llandudno for a spell. Horace envied them, but
+he saw them off at the station as an elder brother should, and
+tipped the porters.
+
+Certainly he was relieved of the formality of paying eight pounds
+a week to his brother. But this did not help him much. The sad
+fact was that 'things' (by which is meant fate, circumstances,
+credit, and so on) had gone too far. It was no longer a question
+of eight pounds a week; it was a question of final ruin.
+
+Surely he might have borrowed money from Sidney? Sidney had no
+money; the money was Ella's, and Horace could not have brought
+himself to borrow money from a woman--from Ella, from a heavenly
+creature who always had a soothing sympathetic word for him. That
+would have been to take advantage of Ella. No, if you suggest such
+a thing, you do not know Horace.
+
+I stated in the beginning that he had no faults. He was therefore
+absolutely honest. And he called his creditors together while he
+could yet pay them twenty shillings in the pound. It was a noble
+act, rare enough in the Five Towns and in other parts of England.
+But he received no praise for it. He had only done what every man
+in his position ought to do. If Horace had failed for ten times
+the sum that his debts actually did amount to, and then paid two
+shillings in the pound instead of twenty, he would have made a
+stir in the world and been looked up to as no ordinary man of
+business.
+
+Having settled his affairs in this humdrum, idiotic manner, Horace
+took a third-class return to Llandudno. Sidney and Ella were
+staying at the hydro with the strange Welsh name, and he found
+Sidney lolling on the sunshiny beach in front of the hydro
+discoursing on the banjo to himself. When asked where his wife
+was, Sidney replied that she was lying down, and was obliged to
+rest as much as possible.
+
+Horace, ashamed to trouble this domestic idyl, related his
+misfortunes as airily as he could.
+
+And Sidney said he was awfully sorry, and had no notion how
+matters stood, and could he do anything for Horace? If so, Horace
+might--
+
+'No,' said Horace. 'I'm all right. I've very fortunately got an
+excellent place as manager in a big new manufactory in Germany.'
+(This is how we deal with German competition in the Five Towns.)
+
+'Germany?' cried Sidney.
+
+'Yes,' said Horace; 'and I start the day after tomorrow.'
+
+'Well,' said Sidney, 'at any rate you'll stay the night.'
+
+'Thanks,' said Horace, 'you're very kind. I will.'
+
+So they went into the hydro together, Sidney caressing his
+wonderful new pearl-inlaid banjo; and Horace talked in low tones
+to Ella as she lay on the sofa. He convinced Ella that his
+departure to Germany was the one thing he had desired all his
+life, because it was not good that Ella should be startled,
+shocked, or grieved.
+
+They dined well.
+
+But in the night Sidney had a recurrence of his old illness--a bad
+attack; and Horace sat up through the dark hours, fetched the
+doctor, and bought things at the chemist's. Towards morning Sidney
+was better. And Horace, standing near the bed, gazed at his
+stepbrother and tried in his stupid way to read the secrets
+beneath that curly hair. But he had no success. He caught himself
+calculating how much Sidney had cost him, at periods of his career
+when he could ill spare money; and, having caught himself, he was
+angry with himself for such baseness. At eight o'clock he ventured
+to knock at Ella's door and explain to her that Sidney had not
+been quite well. She had passed a peaceful night, for he had, of
+course, refrained from disturbing her.
+
+He was not quite sure whether Sidney had meant him to stay at the
+hydro as his guest, so he demanded a bill, paid it, said good-bye,
+and left for Bonn-on-the-Rhine. He was very exhausted and sleepy.
+Happily the third-class carriages on the London & North-Western
+are pretty comfortable. Between Chester and Crewe he had quite a
+doze, and dreamed that he had married Ella after all, and that her
+twenty thousand pounds had put the earthenware business on a
+footing of magnificent and splendid security.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+A few months later Horace's house and garden at Toft End were put
+up to auction by arrangement with his mortgagee and his trade-
+creditors. And Sidney was struck with the idea of buying the
+place. The impression was that it would go cheap. Sidney said it
+would be a pity to let the abode pass out of the family. Ella said
+that the idea of buying it was a charming one, because in the
+garden it was that she had first met her Sidney. So the place was
+duly bought, and Sidney and Ella went to live there.
+
+Several years elapsed.
+
+Then one day little Horace was informed that his uncle Horace,
+whom he had never seen, was coming to the house on a visit, and
+that he must be a good boy, and polite to his uncle, and all the
+usual sort of thing.
+
+And in effect Horace the elder did arrive in the afternoon. He
+found no one to meet him at the station, or at the garden gate of
+the pleasaunce that had once been his, or even at the front door.
+A pert parlour-maid told him that her master and mistress were
+upstairs in the nursery, and that he was requested to go up. And
+he went up, and to be sure Sidney met him at the top of the
+stairs, banjo in hand, cigarette in mouth, smiling, easy and
+elegant as usual--not a trace of physical weakness in his face or
+form. And Horace was jocularly ushered into the nursery and
+introduced to his nephew. Ella had changed. She was no longer
+slim, and no longer gay and serious by turns. She narrowly missed
+being stout, and she was continuously gay, like Sidney. The child
+was also gay. Everybody was glad to see Horace, but nobody seemed
+deeply interested in Horace's affairs. As a fact he had done
+rather well in Germany, and had now come back to England in order
+to assume a working partnership in a small potting concern at
+Hanbridge. He was virtually beginning life afresh. But what
+concerned Sidney and Ella was themselves and their offspring. They
+talked incessantly about the infinitesimal details of their daily
+existence, and the alterations which they had made, or meant to
+make, in the house and garden. And occasionally Sidney thrummed a
+tune on the banjo to amuse the infant. Horace had expected them to
+be curious about Germany and his life in Germany. But not a bit!
+He might have come in from the next street and left them only
+yesterday, for all the curiosity they exhibited.
+
+'Shall we go down to the drawing-room and have tea, eh?' said
+Ella.
+
+'Yes, let's go and kill the fatted calf,' said Sidney.
+
+And strangely enough, inexplicably enough, Horace did feel like a
+prodigal.
+
+Sidney went off with his precious banjo, and Ella picked up sundry
+belongings without which she never travelled about the house.
+
+'You carry me down-stairs, unky?' the little nephew suggested,
+with an appealing glance at his new uncle. 'No,' said Horace, 'I'm
+dashed if I do!'
+
+
+
+
+BABY'S BATH
+
+I
+
+
+Mrs Blackshaw had a baby. It would be an exaggeration to say that
+the baby interested the entire town, Bursley being an ancient,
+blase sort of borough of some thirty thousand inhabitants. Babies,
+in fact, arrived in Bursley at the rate of more than a thousand
+every year. Nevertheless, a few weeks after the advent of Mrs
+Blackshaw's baby, when the medical officer of health reported to
+the Town Council that the births for the month amounted to ninety-
+five, and that the birth-rate of Bursley compared favourably with
+the birth-rates of the sister towns, Hanbridge, Knype, Longshaw,
+and Turnhill--when the medical officer read these memorable words
+at the monthly meeting of the Council, and the Staffordshire
+Signal reported them, and Mrs Blackshaw perused them, a blush of
+pride spread over Mrs Blackshaw's face, and she picked up the
+baby's left foot and gave it a little peck of a kiss. She could
+not help feeling that the real solid foundation of that formidable
+and magnificent output of babies was her baby. She could not help
+feeling that she had done something for the town--had caught the
+public eye.
+
+As for the baby, except that it was decidedly superior to the
+average infant in external appearance and pleasantness of
+disposition, it was, in all essential characteristics, a typical
+baby--that is to say, it was purely sensuous and it lived the
+life of the senses. It was utterly selfish. It never thought of
+anyone but itself. It honestly imagined itself to be the centre of
+the created universe. It was convinced that the rest of the
+universe had been brought into existence solely for the
+convenience and pleasure of it--the baby. When it wanted anything
+it made no secret of the fact, and it was always utterly
+unscrupulous in trying to get what it wanted. If it could have
+obtained the moon it would have upset all the astronomers of
+Europe and made Whitaker's Almanack unsalable without a pang. It
+had no god but its stomach. It never bothered its head about
+higher things. It was a bully and a coward, and it treated women
+as beings of a lower order than men. In a word, it was that ideal
+creature, sung of the poets, from which we gradually sink and fall
+away as we grow older.
+
+At the age of six months it had quite a lot of hair, and a
+charming rosy expanse at the back of its neck, caused through
+lying on its back in contemplation of its own importance. It
+didn't know the date of the Battle of Hastings, but it knew with
+the certainty of absolute knowledge that it was master of the
+house, and that the activity of the house revolved round it.
+
+Now, the baby loved its bath. In any case its bath would have been
+an affair of immense and intricate pomp; but the fact that it
+loved its bath raised the interest and significance of the bath to
+the nth power. The bath took place at five o'clock in the evening,
+and it is not too much to say that the idea of the bath was
+immanent in the very atmosphere of the house. When you have an
+appointment with the dentist at five o'clock in the afternoon the
+idea of the appointment is immanent in your mind from the first
+moment of your awakening. Conceive that an appointment with the
+dentist implies heavenly joy instead of infernal pain, and you
+will have a notion of the daily state of Mrs Blackshaw and Emmie
+(the nurse) with regard to the baby's bath.
+
+Even at ten in the morning Emmie would be keeping an eye on the
+kitchen fire, lest the cook might let it out. And shortly after
+noon Mrs Blackshaw would be keeping an eye on the thermometer in
+the bedroom where the bath occurred. From four o'clock onwards the
+clocks in the house were spied on and overlooked like suspected
+persons; but they were used to that, because the baby had his
+sterilized milk every two hours. I have at length allowed you to
+penetrate the secret of his sex.
+
+And so at five o'clock precisely the august and exciting ceremony
+began in the best bedroom. A bright fire was burning (the month
+being December), and the carefully-shaded electric lights were
+also burning. A large bath-towel was spread in a convenient place
+on the floor, and on the towel were two chairs facing each other,
+and a table. On one chair was the bath, and on the other was Mrs
+Blackshaw with her sleeves rolled up, and on Mrs Blackshaw was
+another towel, and on that towel was Roger (the baby). On the
+table were zinc ointment, vaseline, scentless eau de Cologne,
+Castile soap, and a powder-puff.
+
+Emmie having pretty nearly filled the bath with a combination of
+hot and cold waters, dropped the floating thermometer into it, and
+then added more waters until the thermometer indicated the precise
+temperature proper for a baby's bath. But you are not to imagine
+that Mrs Blackshaw trusted a mere thermometer. No. She put her arm
+in the water up to the elbow. She reckoned the sensitive skin near
+the elbow was worth forty thermometers.
+
+Emmie was chiefly an audience. Mrs Blackshaw had engaged her as a
+nurse, but she could have taught a nigger-boy to do all that she
+allowed the nurse to do. During the bath Mrs Blackshaw and Emmie
+hated and scorned each other, despite their joy. Emmie was twice
+Mrs Blackshaw's age, besides being twice her weight, and she knew
+twice as much about babies as Mrs Blackshaw did. However, Mrs
+Blackshaw had the terrific advantage of being the mother of that
+particular infant, and she could always end an argument when she
+chose, and in her own favour. It was unjust, and Emmie felt it to
+be unjust; but this is not a world of justice.
+
+Roger, though not at all precocious, was perfectly aware of the
+carefully-concealed hostility between his mother and his nurse,
+and often, with his usual unscrupulousness, he used it for his own
+ends. He was sitting upon his mother's knees toying with the edge
+of the bath, already tasting its delights in advance. Mrs
+Blackshaw undressed the upper half of him, and then she laid him
+on the flat of his back and undressed the lower half of him, but
+keeping some wisp of a garment round his equatorial regions. And
+then she washed his face with a sponge and the Castile soap, very
+gently, but not half gently enough for Emmie, nor half gently
+enough for Roger, for Roger looked upon this part of the business
+as insulting and superfluous. He breathed hard and kicked his feet
+nearly off.
+
+'Yes, it's dreadful having our face washed, isn't it?' said Mrs
+Blackshaw, with her sleeves up, and her hair by this time down.
+'We don't like it, do we? Yes, yes.'
+
+Emmie grunted, without a sound, and yet Mrs Blackshaw heard her,
+and finished that face quickly and turned to the hands.
+
+'Potato-gardens every day,' she said. 'Evzy day-day. Enough of
+that, Colonel!' (For, after all, she had plenty of spirit.) 'Fat
+little creases! Fat little creases! There! He likes that! There!
+Feet! Feet! Feet and legs! Then our back. And then WHUP we shall
+go into the bath! That's it. Kick! Kick your mother!'
+
+And she turned him over.
+
+'Incredible bungler!' said the eyes of the nurse. 'Can't she turn
+him over neater than that?'
+
+'Harridan!' said the eyes of Mrs Blackshaw. 'I wouldn't let you
+bath him for twenty thousand pounds!'
+
+Roger continued to breathe hard, as if his mother were a horse and
+he were rubbing her down.
+
+'Now! Zoop! Whup!' cried his mother, and having deprived him of
+his final rag, she picked him up and sat him in the bath, and he
+was divinely happy, and so were the women. He appeared a gross
+little animal in the bath, all the tints of his flesh shimmering
+under the electric light. His chest was superb, but the rolled and
+creased bigness of his inordinate stomach was simply appalling,
+not to mention his great thighs and calves. The truth was, he had
+grown so that if he had been only a little bit bigger, he would
+have burst the bath. He resembled an old man who had been steadily
+eating too much for about forty years.
+
+His two womenfolk now candidly and openly worshipped him,
+forgetting sectarian differences.
+
+And he splashed. Oh! he splashed. You see, he had learnt how to
+splash, and he had certainly got an inkling that to splash was
+wicked and messy. So he splashed--in his mother's face, in Emmie's
+face, in the fire. He pretty well splashed the fire out. Ten
+minutes before, the bedroom had been tidy, a thing of beauty. It
+was now naught but a wild welter of towels, socks, binders--
+peninsulas of clothes nearly surrounded by water.
+
+Finally his mother seized him again, and, rearing his little legs
+up out of the water, immersed the whole of his inflated torso
+beneath the surface.
+
+'Hallo!' she exclaimed. 'Did the water run over his mouf? Did it?'
+
+'Angels and ministers of grace defend us! How clumsy she is!'
+commented the eyes of Emmie.
+
+'There! I fink that's about long enough for this kind of wevver,'
+said the mother.
+
+'I should think it was! There's almost a crust of ice on the water
+now!' the nurse refrained from saying.
+
+And Roger, full of regrets, was wrenched out of the bath. He had
+ceased breathing hard while in the water, but he began again
+immediately he emerged.
+
+'We don't like our face wiped, do we?' said his mother on his
+behalf. 'We want to go back into that bath. We like it. It's more
+fun than anything that happens all day long! Eh? That old
+dandruff's coming up in fine style. It's a-peeling off like
+anything.'
+
+And all the while she wiped him, patted eau de Cologne into him
+with the flat of her hand, and rubbed zinc ointment into him, and
+massaged him, and powdered him, and turned him over and over and
+over, till he was thoroughly well basted and cooked. And he kept
+on breathing hard.
+
+Then he sneezed, amid general horror!
+
+'I told you so!' the nurse didn't say, and she rushed to the bed
+where all the idol's beautiful, clean, aired things were lying
+safe from splashings, and handed a flannel shirt, about two inches
+in length, to Mrs Blackshaw. And Mrs Blackshaw rolled the left
+sleeve of it into a wad and stuck it over his arm, and his poor
+little vaccination marks were hidden from view till next morning.
+Roger protested.
+
+'We don't like clothes, do we?' said his mother. 'We want to
+tumble back into our tub. We aren't much for clothes anyway. We'se
+a little Hottentot, aren't we?'
+
+And she gradually covered him with one garment or another until
+there was nothing left of him but his head and his hands and feet.
+And she sat him up on her knees, so as to fasten his things
+behind. And then it might have been observed that he was no longer
+breathing hard, but giving vent to a sound between a laugh and a
+cry, while sucking his thumb and gazing round the room.
+
+'That's our little affected cry that we start for our milk, isn't
+it?' his mother explained to him.
+
+And he agreed that it was.
+
+And before Emmie could fly across the room for the bottle, all
+ready and waiting, his mouth, in the shape of a perfect rectangle,
+had monopolized five-sixths of his face, and he was scarlet and
+bellowing with impatience.
+
+He took the bottle like a tiger his prey, and seized his mother's
+hand that held the bottle, and he furiously pumped the milk into
+that insatiable gulf of a stomach. But he found time to gaze about
+the room too. A tear stood in each roving eye, caused by the
+effort of feeding.
+
+'Yes, that's it,' said his mother. 'Now look round and see what's
+happening. Curiosity! Well, if you WILL bob your head, I can't
+help it.'
+
+'Of course you can!' the nurse didn't say.
+
+Then he put his finger into his mouth side by side with the
+bottle, and gagged himself, and choked, and gave a terrible--
+excuse the word--hiccough. After which he seemed to lose interest
+in the milk, and the pumping operations slackened and then ceased.
+
+'Goosey!' whispered his mother, 'getting seepy? Is the sandman
+throwing sand in your eyes? Old Sandman at it? Sh--' ... He had
+gone.
+
+Emmie took him. The women spoke in whispers. And Mrs Blackshaw,
+after a day spent in being a mother, reconstituted herself a wife,
+and began to beautify herself for her husband.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Yes, there was a Mr Blackshaw, and with Mr Blackshaw the tragedy
+of the bath commences. Mr Blackshaw was a very important young
+man. Indeed, it is within the mark to say that, next to his son,
+he was the most important young man in Bursley. For Mr Blackshaw
+was the manager of the newly opened Muncipal Electricity Works.
+And the Municipal Electricity had created more excitement and
+interest than anything since the 1887 Jubilee, when an ox was
+roasted whole in the market-place and turned bad in the process.
+Had Bursley been a Swiss village, or a French country town, or a
+hamlet in Arizona, it would have had its electricity fifteen years
+ago, but being only a progressive English Borough, with an annual
+value of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, it struggled on with
+gas till well into the twentieth century. Its great neighbour
+Hanbridge had become acquainted with electricity in the nineteenth
+century.
+
+All the principal streets and squares, and every decent shop that
+Hanbridge competition had left standing, and many private houses,
+now lighted themselves by electricity, and the result was splendid
+and glaring and coldly yellow. Mr. Blackshaw developed into the
+hero of the hour. People looked at him in the street as though he
+had been the discoverer and original maker of electricity. And if
+the manager of the gasworks had not already committed murder, it
+was because the manager of the gasworks had a right sense of what
+was due to his position as vicar's churchwarden at St Peter's
+Church.
+
+But greatness has its penalties. And the chief penalty of Mr
+Blackshaw's greatness was that he could not see Roger have his
+nightly bath. It was impossible for Mr Blackshaw to quit his
+arduous and responsible post before seven o'clock in the evening.
+Later on, when things were going more smoothly, he might be able
+to get away; but then, later on, his son's bath would not be so
+amusing and agreeable as it then, by all reports, was. The baby
+was, of course, bathed on Saturday nights, but Sunday afternoon
+and evening Mr Blackshaw was obliged to spend with his invalid
+mother at Longshaw. It was on the sole condition of his weekly
+presence thus in her house that she had consented not to live with
+the married pair. And so Mr Blackshaw could not witness Roger's
+bath. He adored Roger. He understood Roger. He weighed, nursed,
+and fed Roger. He was 'up' in all the newest theories of infant
+rearing. In short, Roger was his passion, and he knew everything
+of Roger except Roger's bath. And when his wife met him at the
+front door of a night at seven-thirty and launched instantly into
+a description of the wonders, delights, and excitations of Roger's
+latest bath, Mr Blackshaw was ready to tear his hair with
+disappointment and frustration.
+
+'I suppose you couldn't put it off for a couple of hours one
+night, May?' he suggested at supper on the evening of the
+particular bath described above.
+
+'Sidney!' protested Mrs Blackshaw, pained.
+
+Mr Blackshaw felt that he had gone too far, and there was a
+silence.
+
+'Well!' said Mr Blackshaw at length, 'I have just made up my mind.
+I'm going to see that Kid's bath, and, what's more, I'm going to
+see it tomorrow. I don't care what happens.'
+
+'But how shall you manage to get away, darling?'
+
+'You will telephone me about a quarter of an hour before you're
+ready to begin, and I'll pretend it's something very urgent, and
+scoot off.'
+
+'Well, that will be lovely, darling!' said Mrs Blackshaw. 'I WOULD
+like you to see him in the bath, just once! He looks so--'
+
+And so on.
+
+The next day, Mr Blackshaw, that fearsome autocrat of the
+Municipal Electricity Works, was saying to himself all day that at
+five o'clock he was going to assist at the spectacle of his
+wonderful son's bath. The prospect inspired him. So much so that
+every hand on the place was doing its utmost in fear and
+trembling, and the whole affair was running with the precision and
+smoothness of a watch.
+
+From four o'clock onwards, Mr Blackshaw, in the solemn,
+illuminated privacy of the managerial office, safe behind glass
+partitions, could no more contain his excitement. He hovered in
+front of the telephone, waiting for it to ring. Then, at a quarter
+to five, just when he felt he couldn't stand it any longer, and
+was about to ring up his wife instead of waiting for her to ring
+him up, he saw a burly shadow behind the glass door, and gave a
+desolate sigh. That shadow could only be thrown by one person, and
+that person was his Worship the Mayor of Bursley. His Worship
+entered the private office with mayoral assurance, pulling in his
+wake a stout old lady whom he introduced as his aunt from
+Wolverhampton. And he calmly proposed that Mr Blackshaw should
+show the mayoral aunt over the new Electricity Works!
+
+Mr Blackshaw was sick of showing people over the Works. Moreover,
+he naturally despised the Mayor. All permanent officials of
+municipalities thoroughly despise their mayors (up their sleeves).
+A mayor is here today and gone tomorrow, whereas a permanent
+official is permanent. A mayor knows nothing about anything except
+his chain and the rules of debate, and he is, further, a tedious
+and meddlesome person--in the opinion of permanent officials.
+
+So Mr Blackshaw's fury at the inept appearance of the Mayor and
+the mayoral aunt at this critical juncture may be imagined. The
+worst of it was, he didn't know how to refuse the Mayor.
+
+Then the telephone-bell rang.
+
+'Excuse me,' said Mr Blackshaw, with admirably simulated
+politeness, going to the instrument. 'Are you there? Who is it?'
+
+'It's me, darling,' came the thin voice of his wife far away at
+Bleakridge. 'The water's just getting hot. We're nearly ready. Can
+you come now?'
+
+'By Jove! Wait a moment!' exclaimed Mr Blackshaw, and then turning
+to his visitors, 'Did you hear that?'
+
+'No,' said the Mayor.
+
+'All those three new dynamos that they've got at the Hanbridge
+Electricity Works have just broken down. I knew they would. I told
+them they would!'
+
+'Dear, dear!' said the Mayor of Bursley, secretly delighted by
+this disaster to a disdainful rival. 'Why! They'll have the town
+in darkness. What are they going to do?'
+
+'They want me to go over at once. But, of course, I can't. At
+least, I must give myself the pleasure of showing you and this
+lady over our Works, first.'
+
+'Nothing of the kind, Mr Blackshaw!' said the Mayor. 'Go at once.
+Go at once. If Bursley can be of any assistance to Hanbridge in
+such a crisis, I shall be only too pleased. We will come tomorrow,
+won't we, auntie?'
+
+Mr Blackshaw addressed the telephone.
+
+'The Mayor is here, with a lady, and I was just about to show them
+over the Works, but his Worship insists that I come at once.'
+
+'Certainly,' the Mayor put in pompously.
+
+'Wonders will never cease,' came the thin voice of Mrs Blackshaw
+through the telephone. 'It's very nice of the old thing! What's
+his lady friend like?'
+
+'Not like anything. Unique!' replied Mr Blackshaw.
+
+'Young?' came the voice.
+
+'Dates from the thirties,' said Mr Blackshaw. 'I'm coming.' And
+rang off.
+
+'I didn't know there was any electric machinery as old as that,'
+said the mayoral aunt.
+
+'We'll just look about us a bit,' the Mayor remarked. 'Don't lose
+a moment, Mr Blackshaw.'
+
+And Mr Blackshaw hurried off, wondering vaguely how he should
+explain the lie when it was found out, but not caring much. After
+all, he could easily ascribe the episode to the trick of some
+practical joker.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+He arrived at his commodious and electrically lit residence in the
+very nick of time, and full to overflowing with innocent paternal
+glee. Was he not about to see Roger's tub? Roger was just ready to
+be carried upstairs as Mr Blackshaw's latchkey turned in the door.
+
+'Wait a sec!' cried Mr Blackshaw to his wife, who had the child in
+her arms, 'I'll carry him up.'
+
+And he threw away his hat, stick, and overcoat and grabbed
+ecstatically at the infant. And he had got perhaps halfway up the
+stairs, when lo! the electric light went out. Every electric light
+in the house went out.
+
+'Great Scott!' breathed Mr Blackshaw, aghast.
+
+He pulled aside the blind of the window at the turn of the stairs,
+and peered forth. The street was as black as your hat, or nearly
+so.
+
+'Great Scott!' he repeated. 'May, get candles.'
+
+Something had evidently gone wrong at the Works. Just his luck! He
+had quitted the Works for a quarter of an hour, and the current
+had failed!
+
+Of course, the entire house was instantly in an uproar, turned
+upside down, startled out of its life. But a few candles soon
+calmed its transports. And at length Mr Blackshaw gained the
+bedroom in safety, with the offspring of his desires comfortable
+in a shawl.
+
+'Give him to me,' said May shortly. 'I suppose you'll have to go
+back to the Works at once?'
+
+Mr Blackshaw paused, and then nerved himself; but while he was
+pausing, May, glancing at the two feeble candles, remarked: 'It's
+very tiresome. I'm sure I shan't be able to see properly.'
+
+'No!' almost shouted Mr Blackshaw. 'I'll watch this kid have his
+bath or I'll die for it! I don't care if all the Five Towns are in
+darkness. I don't care if the Mayor's aunt has got caught in a
+dynamo and is suffering horrible tortures. I've come to see this
+bath business, and dashed if I don't see it!'
+
+'Well, don't stand between the bath and the fire, dearest,' said
+May coldly.
+
+Meanwhile, Emmie, having pretty nearly filled the bath with a
+combination of hot and cold waters, dropped the floating
+thermometer into it, and then added more waters until the
+thermometer indicated the precise temperature proper for a baby's
+bath. But you are not to imagine that Mrs Blackshaw trusted a
+thermometer--
+
+She did not, however, thrust her bared arm into the water this
+time. No! Roger, who never cried before his bath, was crying, was
+indubitably crying. And he cried louder and louder.
+
+'Stand where he can't see you, dearest. He isn't used to you at
+bath-time,' said Mrs Blackshaw still coldly. 'Are you, my pet?
+There! There!'
+
+Mr Blackshaw effaced himself, feeling a fool. But Roger continued
+to cry. He cried himself purple. He cried till the veins stood out
+on his forehead and his mouth was like a map of Australia. He
+cried himself into a monster of ugliness. Neither mother nor nurse
+could do anything with him at all.
+
+'I think you've upset him, dearest,' said Mrs Blackshaw even more
+coldly. 'Hadn't you better go?'
+
+'Well--' protested the father.
+
+'I think you had better go,' said Mrs Blackshaw, adding no term of
+endearment, and visibly controlling herself with difficulty.
+
+And Mr Blackshaw went. He had to go. He went out into the
+unelectric night. He headed for the Works, not because he cared
+twopence, at that moment, about the accident at the Works,
+whatever it was; but simply because the Works was the only place
+to go to. And even outside in the dark street he could hear the
+rousing accents of his progeny.
+
+People were talking to each other as they groped about in the
+road, and either making jokes at the expense of the new
+Electricity Department, or frankly cursing it with true Five Towns
+directness of speech. And as Mr Blackshaw went down the hill into
+the town his heart was as black as the street itself with rage and
+disappointment. He had made his child cry!
+
+Someone stopped him.
+
+'Eh, Mester Blackshaw!' said a voice, and under the voice a hand
+struck a match to light a pipe. 'What's th' maning o' this eclipse
+as you'm treating us to?'
+
+Mr Blackshaw looked right through the inquirer--a way he had when
+his brain was working hard. And he suddenly smiled by the light of
+the match.
+
+'That child wasn't crying because I was there,' said Mr Blackshaw
+with solemn relief. 'Not at all! He was crying because he didn't
+understand the candles. He isn't used to candles, and they
+frightened him.'
+
+And he began to hurry towards the Works.
+
+At the same instant the electric light returned to Bursley. The
+current was resumed.
+
+'That's better,' said Mr Blackshaw, sighing.
+
+
+
+
+THE SILENT BROTHERS
+
+I
+
+
+John and Robert Hessian, brothers, bachelors, and dressed in
+mourning, sat together after supper in the parlour of their house
+at the bottom of Oldcastle Street, Bursley. Maggie, the middle-
+aged servant, was clearing the table.
+
+'Leave the cloth and the coffee,' said John, the elder, 'Mr
+Liversage is coming in.'
+
+'Yes, Mr John,' said Maggie.
+
+'Slate, Maggie,' Robert ordered laconically, with a gesture
+towards the mantelpiece behind him.
+
+'Yes, Mr Robert,' said Maggie.
+
+She gave him a slate with slate-pencil attached, which hung on a
+nail near the mantlepiece.
+
+Robert took the slate and wrote on it: 'What is Liversage coming
+about?'
+
+And he pushed the slate across the table to John.
+
+Whereupon John wrote on the slate: 'Don't know. He telephoned me
+he wanted to see us tonight.'
+
+And he pushed back the slate to Robert.
+
+This singular procedure was not in the least attributable to
+deafness on the part of the brothers; they were in the prime of
+life, aged forty-two and thirty-nine respectively, and in complete
+possession of all their faculties. It was due simply to the fact
+that they had quarrelled, and would not speak to each other. The
+history of their quarrel would be incredible were it not full of
+that ridiculous pathetic quality known as human nature, and did
+not similar things happen frequently in the manufacturing
+Midlands, where the general temperament is a fearful and strange
+compound of pride, obstinacy, unconquerableness, romance, and
+stupidity. Yes, stupidity.
+
+No single word had passed between the brothers in that house for
+ten years. On the morning after the historical quarrel Robert had
+not replied when John spoke to him. 'Well,' said John's secret
+heart--and John's secret heart ought to have known better, as it
+was older than its brother heart--'I'll teach him a lesson. I
+won't speak until he does.' And Robert's secret heart had somehow
+divined this idiotic resolution, and had said: 'We shall see.'
+Maggie had been the first to notice the stubborn silence. Then
+their friends noticed it, especially Mr Liversage, the solicitor,
+their most intimate friend. But you are not to suppose that
+anybody protested very strongly. For John and Robert were not the
+kind of men with whom liberties may be taken; and, moreover,
+Bursley was slightly amused--at the beginning. It assumed the
+attitude of a disinterested spectator at a fight. It wondered who
+would win. Of course, it called both the brothers fools, yet in a
+tone somewhat sympathetic, because such a thing as had occurred to
+the Hessians might well occur to any man gifted with the true
+Bursley spirit. There is this to be said for a Bursley man: Having
+made his bed, he will lie on it, and he will not complain.
+
+The Hessians suffered severely by their self-imposed dumbness, but
+they suffered like Stoics. Maggie also suffered, and Maggie would
+not stand it. Maggie it was who had invented the slate. Indeed,
+they had heard some plain truths from that stout, bustling woman.
+They had not yielded, but they had accepted the slate in order to
+minimize the inconvenience to Maggie, and afterwards they deigned
+to make use of it for their own purposes. As for friends--friends
+accustomed themselves to the status quo. There came a time when
+the spectacle of two men chattering to everybody else in a
+company, and not saying a word to each other, no longer appealed
+to Bursley's sense of humour. The silent scenes at which Maggie
+assisted every day did not, either, appeal to Maggie's sense of
+humour, because she had none. So the famous feud grew into a sort
+of elemental fact of Nature. It was tolerated as the weather is
+tolerated. The brothers acquired pride in it; even Bursley
+regarded it as an interesting municipal curiosity. The sole
+imperfection in a lovely and otherwise perfect quarrel was that
+John and Robert, being both employed at Roycroft's Majolica
+Manufactory, the one as works manager and the other as commercial
+traveller, were obliged to speak to each other occasionally in the
+way of business. Artistically, this was a pity, though they did
+speak very sternly and distantly. The partial truce necessitated
+by Roycroft's was confined strictly to Roycroft's. And when Robert
+was not on his journeys, these two tall, strong, dark, bearded men
+might often be seen of a night walking separately and doggedly
+down Oldcastle Street from the works, within five yards of each
+other.
+
+And no one suggested the lunatic asylum. Such is the force of
+pride, of rank stupidity, and of habit.
+
+The slate-scratching was scarcely over that evening when Mr Powell
+Liversage appeared. He was a golden-haired man, with a jolly face,
+lighter and shorter in structure than the two brothers. His
+friendship with them dated from school-days, and it had survived
+even the entrance of Liversage into a learned profession.
+Liversage, who, being a bachelor like the Hessians, had many
+unoccupied evenings, came to see the brothers regularly every
+Saturday night, and one or other of them dropped in upon him most
+Wednesdays; but this particular night was a Thursday.
+
+'How do?' John greeted him succinctly between two puffs of a pipe.
+
+'How do?' replied Liversage.
+
+'How do, Pow?' Robert greeted him in turn, also between two puffs
+of a pipe.
+
+And 'How do, little 'un?' replied Liversage.
+
+A chair was indicated to him, and he sat down, and Robert poured
+out some coffee into a third cup which Maggie had brought. John
+pushed away the extra special of the Staffordshire Signal, which
+he had been reading.
+
+'What's up these days?' John demanded.
+
+'Well,' said Liversage, and both brothers noticed that he was
+rather ill at ease, instead of being humorous and lightly caustic
+as usual, 'the will's turned up.'
+
+'The devil it has!' John exclaimed. 'When?'
+
+'This afternoon.'
+
+And then, as there was a pause, Liversage added: 'Yes, my sons,
+the will's turned up.'
+
+'But where, you cuckoo, sitting there like that?' asked Robert.
+'Where?'
+
+'It was in that registered letter addressed to your sister that
+the Post Office people wouldn't hand over until we'd taken out
+letters of administration.'
+
+'Well, I'm dashed!' muttered John. 'Who'd have thought of that?
+You've got the will, then?'
+
+Liversage nodded.
+
+The Hessians had an elder sister, Mrs Bott, widow of a colour
+merchant, and Mrs Bott had died suddenly three months ago, the
+night after a journey to Manchester. (Even at the funeral the
+brothers had scandalized the town by not speaking to each other.)
+Mrs Bott had wealth, wit, and wisdom, together with certain
+peculiarities, of which one was an excessive secrecy. It was known
+that she had made a will, because she had more than once notified
+the fact, in a tone suggestive of highly important issues, but the
+will had refused to be found. So Mr Liversage had been instructed
+to take out letters of administration of the estate, which, in the
+continued absence of the will, would be divided equally between
+the brothers. And twelve or thirteen thousand pounds may be
+compared to a financial beef-steak that cuts up very handsomely
+for two persons. The carving-knife was about to descend on its
+succulence, when, lo! the will!
+
+'How came the will to be in the post?' asked Robert.
+
+'The handwriting on the envelope was your sister's,' said
+Liversage. 'And the package was posted in Manchester. Very
+probably she had taken the will to Manchester to show it to a
+lawyer or something of that sort, and then she was afraid of
+losing it on the journey back, and so she sent it to herself by
+registered post. But before it arrived, of course, she was dead.'
+
+'That wasn't a bad scheme of poor Mary Ann's!' John commented.
+
+'It was just like her!' said Robert, speaking pointedly to
+Liversage. 'But what an odd thing!'
+
+Now, both these men were, no doubt excusably, agonized by
+curiosity to learn the contents of the will. But would either of
+them be the first to express that curiosity? Never in this world!
+Not for the fortune itself! To do so would scarcely have been
+Bursleyish. It would certainly not have been Hessianlike. So
+Liversage was obliged at length to say--
+
+'I reckon I'd better read you the will, eh?'
+
+The brothers nodded.
+
+'Mind you,' said Liversage, 'it's not my will. I've had nothing to
+do with it; so kindly keep your hair on. As a matter of fact, she
+must have drawn it up herself. It's not drawn properly at all, but
+it's witnessed all right, and it'll hold water, just as well as if
+the blooming Lord Chancellor had fixed it up for her in person.'
+
+He produced the document and read, awkwardly and self-
+consciously--
+
+'"This is my will. You are both of you extremely foolish, John and
+Robert, and I've often told you so. Nobody has ever understood,
+and nobody ever will understand, why you quarrelled like that over
+Annie Emery. You are punishing yourselves, but you are punishing
+her as well, and it isn't fair her waiting all these years. So I
+give all my estate, no matter what it is, to whichever of you
+marries Annie. And I hope this will teach you a lesson. You need
+it more than you need my money. But you must be married within a
+year of my death. And if the one that marries cares to give five
+thousand pounds or so to the other, of course there's nothing to
+prevent him. This is just a hint. And if you don't either of you
+marry Annie within a year, then I just leave everything I have to
+Miss Annie Emery (spinster), stationer and fancy-goods dealer,
+Duck Bank, Bursley. She deserves something for her disappointment,
+and she shall have it. Mr Liversage, solicitor, must kindly be my
+executor. And I commit my soul to God, hoping for a blessed
+resurrection. 20th January, 1896. Signed Mary Ann Bott, widow." As
+I told you, the witnessing is in order,' Liversage finished.
+
+'Give it here,' said John shortly, and scanned the sheet of paper.
+
+And Robert actually walked round the table and looked over his
+brother's shoulder--ample proof that he was terrifically moved.
+
+'And do you mean to tell me that a will like that is good in law?'
+exclaimed John.
+
+'Of course it's good in law!' Liversage replied. 'Legal
+phraseology is a useful thing, and it often saves trouble in the
+end; but it ain't indispensable, you know.'
+
+'Humph!' was Robert's comment as he resumed his seat and relighted
+his pipe.
+
+All three men were nervous. Each was afraid to speak, afraid even
+to meet the eyes of the other two. An unmajestic silence followed.
+
+'Well, I'll be off, I think,' Liversage remarked at length with
+difficulty.
+
+He rose.
+
+'I say,' Robert stopped him. 'Better not say anything about this
+to Miss--to Annie, eh?'
+
+'I will say nothing,' agreed Liversage (infamously and
+unprofessionally concealing the fact that he had already said
+something).
+
+And he departed.
+
+The brothers sat in flustered meditation over the past and the
+future.
+
+Ten years before, Annie Emery had been an orphan of twenty-three,
+bravely starting in business for herself amid the plaudits of the
+admiring town; and John had fallen in love with her courage and
+her sense and her feminine charm. But alas, as Ovid points out,
+how difficult it is for a woman to please only one man! Robert
+also had fallen in love with Annie. Each brother had accused the
+other of underhand and unbrotherly practices in the pursuit of
+Annie. Each was profoundly hurt by the accusations, and each, in
+the immense fatuity of his pride, had privately sworn to prove his
+innocence by having nothing more to do with Annie. Such is life!
+Such is man! Such is the terrible egoism of man! And thus it was
+that, for the sake of wounded pride, John and Robert not only did
+not speak to one another for ten years, but they spoilt at least
+one of their lives; and they behaved ignobly to Annie, who would
+certainly have married either one or the other of them.
+
+At two o'clock in the morning John pulled a coin out of his pocket
+and made the gesture of tossing.
+
+'Who shall go first!' he explained.
+
+Robert had a queer sensation in his spine as his elder brother
+spoke to him for the first time in ten years. He wanted to reply
+vocally. He had a most imperious desire to reply vocally. But he
+could not. Something stronger even than the desire prevented his
+tongue from moving.
+
+John tossed the coin--it was a sovereign--and covered it with his
+hands.
+
+'Tail!' Robert murmured, somewhat hoarsely.
+
+But it was head.
+
+Then they went to bed.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The side door of Miss Emery's shop was in Brick Passage, and not
+in the main street, so that a man, even a man of commanding
+stature and formidable appearance, might by insinuating himself
+into Brick Street, off King Street, and then taking the passage
+from the quieter end, arrive at it without attracting too much
+attention. This course was adopted by John Hessian. From the
+moment when he quitted his own house that Friday evening in June
+he had been subject to the delusion that the collective eye of
+Bursley was upon him. As a matter of fact, the collective eye of
+Bursley is much too large and important to occupy itself
+exclusively with a single individual. Bursley is not a village,
+and let no one think it. Nevertheless, John was subject to the
+delusion.
+
+The shop was shut, as he knew it would be. But the curtained
+window of the parlour, between the side-door and the small
+shuttered side-window of the shop, gave a strange suggestion of
+interesting virgin spotless domesticity within. John cast a
+fearful eye on the main thoroughfare. Nobody seemed to be passing.
+The chapel-keeper of the Wesleyan Chapel on the opposite side of
+Trafalgar Road was refreshing the massive Corinthian portico of
+that fane, and paying no regard whatever to the temple of Eros
+which Miss Emery's shop had suddenly become.
+
+So John knocked.
+
+'I am a fool!' his thought ran as he knocked.
+
+Because he did not know what he was about. He had won the toss,
+and with it the right to approach Annie Emery before his brother.
+But what then? Well, he did desire to marry her, quite as much for
+herself as for his sister's fortune. But what then? How was he
+going to explain the tepidity, the desertion, the long sin against
+love of ten years? In short, how was he going to explain the
+inexplicable? He could decidedly do nothing that evening except
+make a blundering ass of himself. And how soon would Robert have
+the right to come along and say HIS say? That point had not been
+settled. Points so extremely delicate cannot be settled on a
+slate, and he had not dared to broach it viva voce to his younger
+brother. He had been too afraid of a rebuff.
+
+He then hoped that Annie's servant would tell him that Annie was
+out.
+
+Annie, however, took him at a disadvantage by opening the door
+herself.
+
+'Well, MR HESSIAN!' she exclaimed, her face bursting into a swift
+and welcoming smile.
+
+'I was just passing,' the donkey in him blundered forth. 'And I
+thought--'
+
+However, in fifteen seconds he was on the domestic side of the
+sitting-room window, and seated in the antimacassared armchair
+between the fire-place and the piano, and Annie had taken his hat
+and told him that her servant was out for the evening.
+
+'But I'm disturbing your supper, Miss Emery,' he said. Flurried
+though he was, he could not fail to notice the white embroidered
+cloth spread diagonally on the table, and the cold meat and the
+pastry and the glittering cutlery and crystal thereon.
+
+'Not at all,' she replied. 'You haven't had supper yet, I expect?'
+
+'No,' he said, not thinking.
+
+'It will be nice of you to help me to eat mine,' said she.
+
+'Oh! But really--'
+
+But she got plates and things out of the cupboard below the
+bookcase--and there he was! She would take no refusal. It was
+wondrous.
+
+'I'm awfully glad I came now,' his thought ran; I'm managing it
+rather well.'
+
+And--
+
+'Poor Bob!'
+
+His sole discomfort was that he could not invent a sufficiently
+ingenious explanation of his call. You can't tell a woman you've
+called to make love to her, and when your previous call happens to
+have been ten years ago, some kind of an explanation does seem to
+be demanded. Ultimately, as Annie was so very pleased to see him,
+so friendly, so feminine, so equal to the occasion, he decided to
+let his presence in her abode that night stand as one of those
+central facts in existence that need no explanation. And they went
+on talking and eating till the dusk deepened and Annie lit the gas
+and drew the blind.
+
+He watched her on the sly as she moved about the room. He decided
+that she did not appear a day older. There was the same plump,
+erect figure, the same neatness, the same fair skin and fair hair,
+the same little nose, the same twinkle in the eye--only perhaps
+the twinkle in the eye was a trifle less cruel than it used to be.
+She was not a day older. (In this he was of course utterly
+mistaken; she was ten years older, she was thirty-three, with ten
+years of successful commercial experience behind her; she would
+never be twenty-three again. Still she was a most desirable woman,
+and a woman infinitely beyond his deserts.) Her air of general
+capability impressed him. And with that there was mingled a
+strange softness, a marvellous hint of a concealed wish to
+surrender.... Well, she made him feel big and masculine--in brief,
+a man.
+
+He regretted the lost ten years. His present way of life seemed
+intolerable to him. The new heaven opened its gate and gave
+glimpses of paradise. After all, he felt himself well qualified
+for that paradise. He felt that he had all along been a woman's
+man, without knowing it.
+
+'By Jove!' his thought ran. 'At this rate I might propose to her
+in a week or two.'
+
+And again--
+
+'Poor old Bobbie!'
+
+A quarter of an hour later, in some miraculous manner, they were
+more intimate than they had ever been, much more intimate. He
+revised his estimate of the time that must elapse before he might
+propose to her. In another five minutes he was fighting hard
+against a mad impulse to propose to her on the spot. And then the
+fight was over, and he had lost. He proposed to her under the
+rose-coloured shade of the Welsbach light.
+
+She drew away, as though shot.
+
+And with the rapidity of lightning, in the silence which followed,
+he went back to his original criticism of himself, that he was a
+fool. Naturally she would request him to leave. She would accuse
+him of effrontery.
+
+Her lips trembled. He prepared to rise.
+
+'It's so sudden!' she said.
+
+Bliss! Glory! Celestial joy! Her words were at least equivalent to
+an absolution of his effrontery! She would accept! She would
+accept! He jumped up and approached her. But she jumped up too and
+retreated. He was not to win his prize so easily.
+
+'Please sit down,' she murmured. 'I must think it over,' she said,
+apparently mastering herself. 'Shall you be at chapel next Sunday
+morning?'
+
+'Yes,' he answered.
+
+'If I am there, and if I am wearing white roses in my hat, it will
+mean--' She dropped her eyes.
+
+'Yes?' he queried.
+
+And she nodded.
+
+'And supposing you aren't there?'
+
+'Then the Sunday after,' she said.
+
+He thanked her in his Hessian style.
+
+'I prefer that way of telling you,' she smiled demurely. 'It will
+avoid the necessity for another--so much--you understand?...'
+
+'Quite so, quite so!' he agreed. 'I quite understand.'
+
+'And if I DO see those roses,' he went on, 'I shall take upon
+myself to drop in for tea, may I?'
+
+She paused.
+
+'In any case, you mustn't speak to me coming out of chapel,
+PLEASE.'
+
+As he walked home down Oldcastle Street he said to himself that
+the age of miracles was not past; also that, after all, he was not
+so old as the tale of his years would mathematically indicate.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Her absence from chapel on the next Sunday disagreed with him.
+However, Robert was away nearly all the week, and he had the house
+to himself to dream in. It frequently happened to him to pass by
+Miss Emery's shop, but he caught no glimpse of her, and though he
+really was in serious need of writing-paper and envelopes, he
+dared not enter. Robert returned on the Friday.
+
+On the morning of the second Sunday, John got up early, in order
+to cope with a new necktie that he had purchased in Hanbridge.
+Nevertheless he found Robert afoot before him, and Robert, by some
+unlucky chance, was wearing not merely a new necktie, but a new
+suit of clothes. They breakfasted in their usual august silence,
+and John gathered from a remark of Robert's to Maggie when she
+brought in the boots that Robert meant to go to chapel. Now,
+Robert, being a commercial traveller and therefore a bit of a
+caution, did not attend chapel with any remarkable assiduity. And
+John, in the privacy of his own mind, blamed him for having been
+so clumsy as to choose that particular morning for breaking the
+habits of a lifetime. Still, the presence of Robert in the pew
+could not prejudicially affect John, and so there was no genuine
+cause for gloominess.
+
+After a time it became apparent that each was waiting for the
+other to go. John began to get annoyed. At last he made the plunge
+and went. Turning his head halfway up Oldcastle Street, opposite
+the mansion which is called 'Miss Peel's', he perceived Robert
+fifty yards behind. It was a glorious June day.
+
+He blushed as he entered chapel. If he was nervous, it may be
+accorded to him as excuse that the happiness of his life depended
+on what he should see within the next few minutes. However, he
+felt pretty sure, though it was exciting all the same.
+
+To reach the Hessian pew he was obliged to pass Miss Emery's. And
+it was empty! Robert arrived.
+
+The organist finished the voluntary. The leading tenor of the
+choir put up the number of the first hymn. The minister ascended
+the staircase of the great mahogany pulpit, and prayed silently,
+and arranged his papers in the leaves of the hymn-book, and
+glanced about to see who was there and who was presumably still in
+bed, and coughed; and then Miss Annie Emery sailed in with that
+air of false calm which is worn by the experienced traveller who
+catches a train by the fifth of a second. The service commenced.
+
+John looked.
+
+She was wearing white roses. There could be no mistake as to that.
+There were about a hundred and fifty-five white roses in the
+garden of her hat.
+
+What a thrill ran through John's heart! He had won Annie, and he
+had won the fortune. Yes, he would give Robert the odd five
+thousand pounds. His state of mind might even lead him to make it
+guineas. He heard not a word of the sermon, and throughout the
+service he rose up and sat down several instants after the rest of
+the congregation, because he was so absent-minded.
+
+After service he waited for everybody else to leave, in order not
+to break his promise to the divine Annie. So did Robert. This ill-
+timed rudeness on Robert's part somewhat retarded the growth of a
+young desire in John's heart to make friends with poor Bob. Then
+he got up and left, and Robert followed.
+
+They dined in silence, John deciding that he would begin his
+overtures of friendship after he had seen Annie, and could tell
+Robert that he was formally engaged. The brothers ate little. They
+both improved their minds during their repast--John with the
+Christian Commonwealth, and Robert with the Saturday cricket
+edition of the Signal (I regret it).
+
+Then, after pipes, they both went out for a walk, naturally not in
+the same direction. The magnificence of the weather filled them
+both with the joy of life. As for John, he went out for a walk
+simply because he could not contain himself within the house. He
+could not wait immovable till four-thirty, the hour at which he
+meant to call on Annie for tea and the betrothal kiss. Therefore
+he ascended to Hillport and wandered as far as Oldcastle, all in a
+silk hat and a frock-coat.
+
+It was precisely half-past four as he turned, unassumingly, from
+Brick Street into Brick Passage, and so approached the side door
+of Annie Emery's. And his astonishment and anger were immense when
+he saw Robert, likewise in silk hat and frock-coat, penetrating
+into Brick Passage from the other end.
+
+They met, and their inflamed spirits collided.
+
+'What's the meaning of this?' John demanded, furious; and,
+simultaneously, Robert demanded: 'What in Hades are YOU doing
+here?'
+
+Only Sunday and the fine clothes and the proximity to Annie
+prevented actual warfare.
+
+'I'm calling on Annie,' said John.
+
+'So am I,' said Robert.
+
+'Well, you're too late,' said John.
+
+'Oh, I'm too late, am I?' said Robert, with a disdainful laugh.
+Thanks!'
+
+'I tell you you're too late,' said John. 'You may as well know at
+once that I've proposed to Annie and she's accepted me.'
+
+'I like that! I like that!' said Robert.
+
+'Don't shout!' said John.
+
+'I'm not shouting,' said Robert. 'But you may as well know that
+you're mistaken, my boy. It's me that's proposed to Annie and been
+accepted. You must be off your chump.'
+
+'When did you propose to her?' said John.
+
+'On Friday, if you must know,' said Robert.
+
+'And she accepted you at once?' said John.
+
+'No. She said that if she was wearing white roses in her hat this
+morning at chapel, that would mean she accepted,' said Robert.
+
+'Liar!' said John.
+
+'I suppose you'll admit she WAS wearing white roses in her hat?'
+said Robert, controlling himself.
+
+'Liar!' said John, and continued breathless: 'That was what she
+said to ME. She must have told you that white roses meant a
+refusal.'
+
+'Oh no, she didn't!' said Robert, quailing secretly, but keeping
+up a formidable show of courage. 'You're an old fool!' he added
+vindictively.
+
+They were both breathing hard, and staring hard at each other.
+
+'Come away,' said John. 'Come away! We can't talk here. She may
+look out of the window.'
+
+So they went away. They walked very quickly home, and, once in the
+parlour, they began to have it out. And, before they had done, the
+reading of cricket news on Sunday was as nothing compared to the
+desecrating iniquity which they committed. The scene was not such
+as can be decently recounted. But about six o'clock Maggie
+entered, and, at considerable personal risk, brought them back to
+a sense of what was due to their name, the town, and the day. She
+then stated that she would not remain in such a house, and she
+departed.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+'But whatever made you do it, dearest?'
+
+These words were addressed to Annie Emery on the glorious summer
+evening which closed that glorious summer day, and they were
+addressed to her by no other person than Powell Liversage. The
+pair were in the garden of the house in Trafalgar Road occupied by
+Mr Liversage and his mother, and they looked westwards over the
+distant ridge of Hillport, where the moon was setting.
+
+'Whatever made me do it!' repeated Annie, and the twinkle in her
+eye had that charming cruelty which John had missed. 'Did they not
+deserve it? Of course, I can talk to you now with perfect freedom,
+can't I? Well, what do you THINK of it? Here for ten years neither
+one nor the other does more than recognize me in the street, and
+then all of a sudden they come down on me like that--simply
+because there's a question of money. I couldn't have believed men
+could be so stupid--no, I really couldn't! They're friends of
+yours, Powell, I know, but--however, that's no matter. But it was
+too ridiculously easy to lead them on! They'd swallow any
+flattery. I just did it to see what they'd do, and I think I
+arranged it pretty well. I quite expected they would call about
+the same time, and then shouldn't I have given them my mind!
+Unfortunately they met outside, and got very hot--I saw them from
+the bedroom window--and went away.'
+
+'You mustn't forget, my dear girl,' said Liversage, 'that it was
+you they quarrelled about. I don't want to defend 'em for a
+minute, but it wasn't altogether the money that sent them to you;
+it was more that the money gave them an excuse for coming!'
+
+'It was a very bad excuse, then!' said Annie.
+
+'Agreed!' Liversage murmured.
+
+The moon was extremely lovely and romantic against the distant
+spire of Hillport Church, and its effect on the couple was just
+what might have been anticipated.
+
+'Perhaps I'm sorry,' Annie admitted at length, with a charming
+grimace.
+
+'Oh! I don't think there's anything to be SORRY about,' said
+Liversage. 'But of course they'll think I've had a hand in it. You
+see, I've never breathed a word to them about--about my feelings
+towards you.'
+
+'No?'
+
+'No. It would have been rather a delicate subject, you see, with
+them. And I'm sure they'll be staggered when they know that we got
+engaged last night. They'll certainly say I've--er--been after
+you for the--No, they won't. They're decent chaps, really; very
+decent.'
+
+'Anyhow, you may be sure, dear,' said Annie stiffly, 'that _I_
+shan't rob them of their vile money! Nothing would induce me to
+touch it!'
+
+'Of course not, dearest!' said Liversage--or, rather the finer
+part of him said it; the baser part somewhat regretted that vile
+twelve thousand or so. (I must be truthful.)
+
+He took her hand again.
+
+At the same moment old Mrs Liversage came hastening down the
+garden, and Liversage dropped the hand.
+
+'Powell,' she said. 'Here's John Hessian, and he wants to see
+you!'
+
+'The dickens!' exclaimed Liversage, glancing at Annie.
+
+'I must go,' said Annie. 'I shall go by the fields. Good night,
+dear Mrs Liversage.'
+
+'Wait ten seconds,' Liversage pleaded, 'and I'll be with you.' And
+he ran off.
+
+John, haggard and undone, was awaiting him in the drawing-room.
+
+'Pow,' said he, 'I've had a fearful row with Bob, and I can't
+possibly sleep in our house tonight. Don't talk to me. But let me
+have one of the beds in your spare room, will you? There's a good
+chap.'
+
+'Why, of course, Johnnie,' said Liversage. 'Of course.'
+
+'And I'll go right to bed now,' said John.
+
+An hour later, after Powell Liversage had seen his affianced to
+her abode and returned home, and after his mother had gone to bed,
+there was a knock at the front door, and Liversage opened to
+Robert Hessian.
+
+'Look here, Pow,' said Robert, whose condition was deplorable, 'I
+want to sleep here tonight. Do you mind? Fact is, I've had a devil
+of a shindy with Jack, and Maggie's run off, and, anyhow, I
+couldn't possibly stop in the same house with Jack tonight.'
+
+'But what--?'
+
+'See here,' said Robert. 'I can't talk. Just let me have a bed in
+your spare room. I'm sure you mother won't mind.'
+
+'Why, certainly,' said Liversage.
+
+He lit a candle, escorted Robert upstairs, opened the door of the
+spare room, gave the candle to Robert, pushed him in, said 'Good
+night,' and shut the door.
+
+What a night!
+
+
+
+
+THE NINETEENTH HAT
+
+
+A dramatic moment was about to arrive in the joint career of
+Stephen Cheswardine and Vera his wife. The motor-car stood by the
+side of the pavement of the Strand, Torquay, that resort of
+southern wealth and fashion. The chauffeur, Felix, had gone into
+the automobile shop to procure petrol. Mr Cheswardine looking
+longer than ever in his long coat, was pacing the busy footpath.
+Mrs Cheswardine, her beauty obscured behind a flowing brown veil,
+was lolling in the tonneau, very pleased to be in the tonneau,
+very pleased to be observed by all Torquay in the tonneau, very
+satisfied with her husband, and with the Napier car, and
+especially with Felix, now buying petrol. Suddenly Mrs Cheswardine
+perceived that next door but one to the automobile shop was a
+milliner's. She sat up and gazed. According to a card in the
+window an 'after-season sale' was in progress that June day at the
+milliner's. There were two rows of hats in the window, each hat
+plainly ticketed. Mrs Cheswardine descended from the car, crossed
+the pavement, and gave to the window the whole of her attention.
+
+She sniffed at most of the hats. But one of them, of green straw,
+with a large curving green wing on either side of the crown, and a
+few odd bits of fluffiness here and there, pleased her. It was
+Parisian. She had been to Paris--once. An 'after-season' sale at a
+little shop in Torquay would not, perhaps, seem the most likely
+place in the world to obtain a chic hat; it is, moreover, a
+notorious fact that really chic hats cannot be got for less than
+three pounds, and this hat was marked ten shillings. Nevertheless,
+hats are most mysterious things. Their quality of being chic is
+more often the fruit of chance than of design, particularly in
+England. You never know when nor where you may light on a good
+hat. Vera considered that she had lighted on one.
+
+'They're probably duck's feathers dyed,' she said to herself. 'But
+it's a darling of a hat and it will suit me to a T.'
+
+As for the price, when once you have taken the ticket off a hat
+the secret of its price is gone forever. Many a hat less smart
+than this hat has been marked in Bond Street at ten guineas
+instead of ten shillings. Hats are like oil-paintings--they are
+worth what people will give for them.
+
+So Vera approached her husband, and said, with an enchanting,
+innocent smile--
+
+'Lend me half-a-sovereign, will you, doggie?'
+
+She called him doggie in those days because he was a sort of dog-
+man, a sort of St Bernard, shaggy and big, with faithful eyes; and
+he enjoyed being called doggie.
+
+But on this occasion he was not to be bewitched by the enchanting
+innocence of the smile nor by the endearing epithet. He refused to
+relax his features.
+
+'You aren't going to buy another hat, are you?' he asked sternly,
+challengingly.
+
+The smile disappeared from her face, and she pulled her slim young
+self together.
+
+'Yes,' she replied harshly.
+
+The battle was definitely engaged. You may inquire why a man
+financially capable of hiring a 20-24 h.p. Napier car, with a
+French chauffeur named Felix, for a week or more, should grudge
+his wife ten shillings for a hat. Well, you are to comprehend that
+it was not a question of ten shillings, it was a question of
+principle. Vera already had eighteen hats, and it had been clearly
+understood between them that no more money should be spent on
+attire for quite a long time. Vera was entirely in the wrong. She
+knew it, and he knew it. But she wanted just that hat.
+
+And they were on their honeymoon, you know: which enormously
+intensified the poignancy of the drama. They had been married only
+six days; in three days more they were to return to the Five
+Towns, where Stephen was solidly established as an earthenware
+manufacturer. You who have been through them are aware what
+ticklish things honeymoons are, and how much depends on the
+tactfulness of the more tactful of the two parties. Stephen,
+thirteen years older than Vera, was the more tactful of the two
+parties. He had married a beautiful and elegant woman, with vast
+unexploited capacities for love in her heart. But he had married a
+capricious woman, and he knew it. So far he had yielded to her
+caprices, as well became him; but in the depths of his masculine
+mind he had his own private notion as to the identity of the
+person who should ultimately be master in their house, and he had
+decided only the previous night that when the next moment for
+being firm arrived, firm he would be.
+
+And now the moment was upon him. It was their eyes that fought,
+silently, bitterly. There is a great deal of bitterness in true
+love.
+
+Stephen perceived the affair broadly, in all its aspects. He was
+older and much more experienced than Vera, and therefore he was
+responsible for the domestic peace, and for her happiness, and for
+his own, and for appearances, and for various other things. He
+perceived the moral degradation which would be involved in an open
+quarrel during the honeymoon. He perceived the difficulties of a
+battle in the street, in such a select and prim street as the
+Strand, Torquay, where the very backbone of England's
+respectability goes shopping. He perceived Vera's vast ignorance
+of life. He perceived her charm, and her naughtiness, and all her
+defects. And he perceived, further, that, this being the first
+conflict of their married existence, it was of the highest
+importance that he should emerge from it the victor. To allow Vera
+to triumph would gravely menace their future tranquillity and
+multiply the difficulties which her adorable capriciousness would
+surely cause. He could not afford to let her win. It was his duty,
+not merely to himself but to her, to conquer. But, on the other
+hand, he had never fully tested her powers of sheer obstinacy, her
+willingness to sacrifice everything for the satisfaction of a
+whim; and he feared these powers. He had a dim suspicion that Vera
+was one of that innumerable class of charming persons who are
+perfectly delicious and perfectly sweet so long as they have
+precisely their own way--and no longer.
+
+Vera perceived only two things. She perceived the hat--although
+her back was turned towards it--and she perceived the half-
+sovereign--although it was hidden in Stephen's pocket.
+
+'But, my dear,' Stephen protested, 'you know--'
+
+'Will you lend me half-a-sovereign?' Vera repeated, in a glacial
+tone. The madness of a desired hat had seized her. She was a
+changed Vera. She was not a loving woman, not a duteous young
+wife, nor a reasoning creature. She was an embodied instinct for
+hats.
+
+'It was most distinctly agreed,' Stephen murmured, restraining his
+anger.
+
+Just then Felix came out of the shop, followed by a procession of
+three men bearing cans of petrol. If Stephen was Napoleon and Vera
+Wellington, Felix was the Blucher of this deplorable altercation.
+Impossible to have a row--yes, a row--with your wife in the
+presence of your chauffeur, with his French ideas of chivalry.
+
+'Will you lend me half-a-sovereign?' Vera reiterated, in the same
+glacial tone, not caring twopence for the presence of Felix.
+
+And Stephen, by means of an interminable silver chain, drew his
+sovereign-case from the profundity of his hip-pocket; it was like
+drawing a bucket out of a well. And he gave Vera half-a-
+sovereign; and THAT was like knotting the rope for his own
+execution.
+
+And while Felix and his three men poured gallons and gallons of
+petrol into a hole under the cushions of the tonneau, Stephen
+swallowed his wrath on the pavement, and Vera remained hidden in
+the shop. And the men were paid and went off, and Felix took his
+seat ready to start. And then Vera came out of the hat place, and
+the new green hat was on her head, and the old one in a bag in her
+pretty hands.
+
+'What do you think of my new hat, Felix?' she smiled to the
+favoured chauffeur; 'I hope it pleases you.'
+
+Felix said that it did.
+
+In these days, chauffeurs are a great race and a privileged. They
+have usurped the position formerly held by military officers.
+Women fawn on them, take fancies to them, and spoil them. They can
+do no wrong in the eyes of the sex. Vera had taken a fancy to
+Felix. Perhaps it was because he had been in a cavalry regiment;
+perhaps it was merely the curve of his moustache. Who knows? And
+Felix treated her as only a Frenchman can treat a pretty woman,
+with a sort of daring humility, with worship--in short, with true
+Gallic appreciation. Vera much enjoyed Gallic appreciation. It
+ravished her to think that she was the light of poor Felix's
+existence, an unattainable star for him. Of course, Stephen didn't
+mind. That is to say, he didn't really mind.
+
+The car rushed off in the direction of Exeter, homewards.
+
+That day, by means of Felix's expert illegal driving, they got as
+far as Bath; and there were no breakdowns. The domestic atmosphere
+in the tonneau was slightly disturbed at the beginning of the run,
+but it soon improved. Indeed, after lunch Stephen grew positively
+bright and gay. At tea, which they took just outside Bristol, he
+actually went so far as to praise the hat. He said that it was a
+very becoming hat, and also that it was well worth the money. In a
+word, he signified to Vera that their first battle had been fought
+and that Vera had won, and that he meant to make the best of it
+and accept the situation.
+
+Vera was naturally charmed, and when she was charmed she was
+charming. She said to herself that she had always known that she
+could manage a man. The recipe for managing a man was firmness
+coupled with charm. But there must be no half measures, no
+hesitations. She had conquered. She saw her future life stretching
+out before her like a beautiful vista. And Stephen was to be her
+slave, and she would have nothing to do but to give rein to her
+caprices, and charm Stephen when he happened to deserve it.
+
+But the next morning the hat had vanished out of the bedroom of
+the exclusive hotel at Bath. Vera could not believe that it had
+vanished; but it had. It was not in the hat-box, nor on the couch,
+nor under the couch, nor perched on a knob of the bedstead, nor in
+any of the spots where it ought to have been. When she realized
+that as a fact it had vanished she was cross, and on inquiring
+from Stephen what trick he had played with her hat, she succeeded
+in conveying to Stephen that she was cross. Stephen was still in
+bed, comatose. The tone of his reply startled her.
+
+'Look here, child,' he said, or rather snapped--he had never been
+snappish before--'since you took the confounded thing off last
+evening I haven't seen it and I haven't touched it, and I don't
+know where it is.'
+
+'But you must--'
+
+'I gave in to you about the hat,' Stephen continued to snap,
+'though I knew I was a fool to do so, and I consider I behaved
+pretty pleasantly over it too. But I don't want any more scenes.
+If you've lost it, that's not my fault.'
+
+Such speeches took Vera very much aback. And she, too, in her
+turn, now saw the dangers of a quarrel, and in this second
+altercation it was Stephen who won. He said he would not even
+mention the disappearance of the hat to the hotel manager. He was
+sure it must be in one of Vera's trunks. And in the end Vera
+performed that day's trip in another hat.
+
+They reached the Five Towns much earlier than they had
+anticipated--before lunch on the ninth day, whereas the new
+servants in their new house at Bursley were only expecting them
+for dinner. So Stephen had the agreeable idea of stopping the car
+in front of the new Hotel Metropole at Hanbridge and lunching
+there. Precisely opposite this new and luxurious caravanserai (as
+they love to call it in the Five Towns) is the imposing garage and
+agency where Stephen had hired the Napier car. Felix said he would
+lunch hurriedly in order to transact certain business at the
+garage before taking them on to Bursley. After lunch, however,
+Vera caught him transacting business with a chambermaid in a
+corridor. Shocking though the revelation is, it needs to be said
+that Felix was kissing the chambermaid. The blow to Mrs
+Cheswardine was severe. She had imagined that Felix spent all his
+time in gazing up to her as an unattainable star.
+
+She spoke to Stephen about it, in the accents of disillusion.
+'What?' cried Stephen. 'Don't you know? They're engaged to be
+married. Her name is Mary Callear. She used to be parlourmaid at
+Uncle John's at Oldcastle. But hotels pay higher wages.'
+
+Felix engaged to a parlourmaid! Felix, who had always seemed to
+Vera a gentleman in disguise! Yes, it was indeed a blow!
+
+But balm awaited Vera at her new home in Bursley. A parcel,
+obviously containing a cardboard box, had arrived for Stephen. He
+opened it, and the lost hat was inside it. Stephen read a note,
+and explained that the hotel people at Bath had found it and
+forwarded it. He began to praise the hat anew. He made Vera put it
+on instantly, and seemed delighted. So much so that Vera went out
+to the porch to say good-bye to Felix in a most forgiving frame of
+mind. She forgave Felix for being engaged to the chambermaid.
+
+And there was the chambermaid walking up the drive, quite calmly!
+Felix, also quite calmly, asked Vera to excuse him, and told the
+chambermaid to get into the car and sit beside him. He then
+informed Vera that he had to go with the car immediately to
+Oldcastle, and was taking Miss Callear with him for the run, this
+being Miss Callear's weekly afternoon off. Miss Callear had come
+to Bursley in the electric tram.
+
+Vera shook with swift anger; not at Felix's information, but the
+patent fact that Mary Callear was wearing a hat which was the
+exact replica of the hat on Vera's own head. And Mary Callear was
+seated like a duchess in the car, while Vera stood on the gravel.
+And two of Vera's new servants were there to see that Vera was
+wearing a hat precisely equivalent to the hat of a chambermaid!
+
+She went abruptly into the house and sought for Stephen--as with a
+sword. But Stephen was not discoverable. She ran to her elegant
+new bedroom and shut herself in. She understood the plot. She had
+plenty of wit. Stephen had concerted it with Felix. In spite of
+Stephen's allegations of innocence, the hat had been sent
+somewhere--probably to Brunt's at Hanbridge--to be copied at
+express speed, and Stephen had presented the copy to Felix, in
+order that Felix might present it to Mary Callear the chambermaid,
+and the meeting in the front garden had been deliberately arranged
+by that odious male, Stephen. Truly, she had not believed Stephen
+capable of such duplicity and cruelty.
+
+She removed the hat, gazed at it, and then tore it to pieces and
+scattered the pieces on the carpet.
+
+An hour later Stephen crept into the bedroom and beheld the
+fragments, and smiled.
+
+'Stephen,' she exclaimed, 'you're a horrid, cruel brute.' 'I know
+I am,' said Stephen. 'You ought to have found that out long
+since.'
+
+'I won't love you any more. It's all over,' she sobbed. But he
+just kissed her.
+
+
+
+
+VERA'S FIRST CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE
+
+I
+
+
+Five days before Christmas, Cheswardine came home to his wife from
+a week's sojourn in London on business. Vera, in her quality of
+the best-dressed woman in Bursley, met him on the doorstep (or
+thereabouts) of their charming but childless home, attired in a
+teagown that would have ravished a far less impressionable male
+than her husband; while he, in his quality of a prosaic and
+flourishing earthenware manufacturer, pretended to take the
+teagown as a matter of course, and gave her the sober, solid kiss
+of a man who has been married six years and is getting used to it.
+
+Still, the teagown had pleased him, and by certain secret symptoms
+Vera knew that it had pleased him. She hoped much from that
+teagown. She hoped that he had come home in a more pacific temper
+than he had shown when he left her, and that she would carry her
+point after all.
+
+Now, naturally, when a husband in easy circumstances, the
+possessor of a pretty and pampered wife, spends a week in London
+and returns five days before Christmas, certain things are rightly
+and properly to be expected from him. It would need an astounding
+courage, an amazing lack of a sense of the amenity of conjugal
+existence in such a husband to enable him to disappoint such
+reasonable expectations. And Cheswardine, though capable of
+pulling the curb very tight on the caprices of his wife, was a
+highly decent fellow. He had no intention to disappoint; he knew
+his duty.
+
+So that during afternoon tea with the teagown in a cosy corner of
+the great Chippendale drawing-room he began to unfasten a small
+wooden case which he had brought into the house in his own hand,
+opened it with considerable precaution, making a fine mess of
+packing-stuff on the carpet, and gradually drew to light a pair of
+vases of Venetian glass. He put them on the mantlepiece.
+
+'There!' he said, proudly, and with a virtuous air.
+
+They were obviously costly antique vases, exquisite in form,
+exquisite in the graduated tints of their pale blue and rose.
+
+'Seventeenth century!' he said.
+
+'They're very nice,' Vera agreed, with a show of enthusiasm. What
+are they for?'
+
+'Your Christmas present,' Cheswardine explained, and added 'my
+dear!'
+
+'Oh, Stephen!' she murmured.
+
+A kiss on these occasions is only just, and Cheswardine had one.
+
+'Duveens told me they were quite unique,' he said, modestly; 'and
+I believe 'em.'
+
+You might imagine that a pair of Venetian vases of the seventeenth
+century, stated by Duveens to be unique, would have satisfied a
+woman who had a generous dress allowance and lacked absolutely
+nothing that was essential. But Vera was not satisfied. She was,
+on the contrary, profoundly disappointed. For the presence of
+those vases proved that she had not carried her point. They
+deprived her of hope. The unpleasantness before Cheswardine went
+to London had been more or less a propos of a Christmas present.
+Vera had seen in Bostock's vast emporium in the neighbouring town
+of Hanbridge, a music-stool in the style known as art nouveau,
+which had enslaved her fancy. She had taken her husband to see it,
+and it had not enslaved her husband's fancy in the slightest
+degree. It was made in light woods, and the woods were curved and
+twisted as though they had recently spent seven years in a
+purgatory for sinful trees. Here and there in the design onyx-
+stones had been set in the wood. The seat itself was beautifully
+soft. What captured Vera was chiefly the fact that it did not open
+at the top, as most elaborate music-stools do, but at either side.
+You pressed a button (onyx) and the panel fell down displaying
+your music in little compartments ready to hand; and the eastern
+moiety of the music-stool was for piano pieces, and the western
+moiety for songs. In short, it was the last word of music-stools;
+nothing could possibly be newer.
+
+But Cheswardine did not like it, and did not conceal his opinion.
+He argued that it would not 'go' with the Chippendale furniture,
+and Vera said that all beautiful things 'went' together, and
+Cheswardine admitted that they did, rather dryly. You see, they
+took the matter seriously because the house was their hobby; they
+were always changing its interior, which was more than they could
+have done for a child, even if they had had one; and Cheswardine's
+finer and soberer taste was always fighting against Vera's
+predilection for the novel and the bizarre. Apart from clothes,
+Vera had not much more than the taste of a mouse.
+
+They did not quarrel in Bostock's. Indeed, they did not quarrel
+anywhere; but after Vera had suggested that he might at any rate
+humour her by giving her the music-stool for a Christmas present
+(she seemed to think this would somehow help it to 'go' with the
+Chippendale), and Cheswardine had politely but firmly declined,
+there had been a certain coolness and quite six tears. Vera had
+caused it to be understood that even if Cheswardine was NOT
+interested in music, even if he did hate music and did call the
+Broadwood ebony grand ugly, that was no reason why she should be
+deprived of a pretty and original music-stool that would keep her
+music tidy and that would be HERS. As for it not going with the
+Chippendale, that was simply an excuse ... etc.
+
+Hence it is not surprising that the Venetian vases of the
+seventeenth century left Vera cold, and that the domestic
+prospects for Christmas were a little cold.
+
+However, Vera, with wifely and submissive tact made the best of
+things; and that evening she began to decorate the hall, dining-
+room, and drawing-room with holly and mistletoe. Before the pair
+retired to rest, the true Christmas feeling, slightly tinged with
+a tender melancholy, permeated the house, and the servants were
+growing excited in advance. The servants weren't going to have a
+dinner-party, with crackers and port and a table-centre unmatched
+in the Five Towns; the servants weren't going to invite their
+friends to an evening's jollity. The servants were merely going to
+work somewhat harder and have somewhat less sleep; but such is the
+magical effect of holly and mistletoe twined round picture-cords
+and hung under chandeliers that the excitement of the servants was
+entirely pleasurable.
+
+And as Vera shut the bedroom door, she said, with a delightful,
+forgiving smile---
+
+'I saw a lovely cigar-cabinet at Bostock's yesterday.'
+
+'Oh!' said Cheswardine, touched. He had no cigar-cabinet, and he
+wanted one, and Vera knew that he wanted one.
+
+And Vera slept in the sweet consciousness of her thoughtful
+wifeliness.
+
+The next morning, at breakfast, Cheswardine demanded--
+
+'Getting pretty hard up, aren't you, Maria?'
+
+He called her Maria when he wished to be arch.
+
+Well,' she said, 'as a matter of fact, I am. What with the--'
+
+And he gave her a five-pound note.
+
+It happened so every year. He provided her with the money to buy
+him a Christmas present. But it is, I hope, unnecessary to say
+that the connection between her present to him and the money he
+furnished was never crudely mentioned.
+
+She made an opportunity, before he left for the works, to praise
+the Venetian vases, and she insisted that he should wrap up well,
+because he was showing signs of one of his bad colds.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+In the early afternoon she went to Bostock's emporium, at
+Hanbridge, to buy the cigar-cabinet and a few domestic trifles.
+Bostock's is a good shop. I do not say that it has the classic and
+serene dignity of Brunt's, over the way, where one orders one's
+dining-room suites and one's frocks for the January dances. But it
+is a good shop, and one of the chief glories of the Paris of the
+Five Towns. It has frontages in three streets, and it might be
+called the shop of the hundred windows. You can buy pretty nearly
+anything at Bostock's, from an art nouveau music-stool up to the
+highest cheese--for there is a provision department. (You can't
+get cheese at Brunt's.)
+
+Vera made her uninteresting purchases first, in the basement, and
+then she went up-stairs to the special Christmas department, which
+certainly was wonderful: a blaze and splendour of electric light;
+a glitter of gilded iridescent toys and knick-knacks; a smiling,
+excited, pushing multitude of faces, young and old; and the
+cashiers in their cages gathering in money as fast as they could
+lay their tired hands on it! A joyous, brilliant scene, calculated
+to bring soft tears of satisfaction to the board of directors that
+presided over Bostock's. It was a record Christmas for Bostock's.
+The electric cars were thundering over the frozen streets of all
+the Five Towns to bring customers to Bostock's. Children dreamt of
+Bostock's. Fathers went to scoff and remained to pay. Brunt's was
+not exactly alarmed, for nothing could alarm Brunt's; but there
+was just a sort of suspicion of something in the air at Brunt's
+that did not make for odious self-conceit. People seemed to become
+intoxicated when they went into Bostock's, to close their heads in
+a frenzy of buying.
+
+And there the art nouveau music-stool stood in the corner, where
+Vera had originally seen it! She approached it, not thinking of
+the terrible danger. The compartments for music lay invitingly
+open.
+
+'Four pounds, nine and six, Mrs Cheswardine,' said a shop-walker,
+who knew her.
+
+She stopped to finger it.
+
+Well, of course everybody is acquainted with that peculiar ecstasy
+that undoubtedly does overtake you in good shops, sometimes,
+especially at Christmas. I prefer to call it ecstasy rather than
+intoxication, but I have heard it called even drunkenness. It is a
+magnificent and overwhelming experience, like a good wine. A blind
+instinct seizes your reason and throws her out of the window of
+your soul, and then assumes entire control of the volitional
+machinery. You listen to no arguments, you care for no
+consequences. You want a thing; you must have it; you do have it.
+
+Vera was caught unawares by this magnificent and overwhelming
+experience, just as she stooped to finger the music-stool. A fig
+for the cigar-cabinet! A fig for her husband's objections! After
+all she was a grown-up woman (twenty-nine or thirty), and entitled
+to a certain freedom. She was not and would not be a slave. It
+would look perfect in the drawing-room.
+
+'I'll take it,' she said.
+
+'Yes, Mrs Cheswardine. A unique thing, quite unique. Penkethman!'
+
+And Vera followed Penkethman to a cash desk and received half-a-
+guinea out of a five-pound note.
+
+'I want it carefully packed,' said Vera.
+
+'Yes, ma'am. It will be delivered in the morning.'
+
+She was just beginning to realize that she had been under the
+sinister influence of the ecstasy, and that she had not bought the
+cigar-cabinet, and that she had practically no more money, and
+that Stephen's rule against credit was the strictest of all his
+rules, when she caught sight of Mr Charles Woodruff buying toys,
+doubtless for his nephews and nieces.
+
+Mr Woodruff was the bachelor friend of the family. He had loved
+Vera before Stephen loved her, and he was still attached to her.
+Stephen and he were chums of the most advanced kind. Why! Stephen
+and Vera thought nothing of bickering in front of Mr Woodruff, who
+rated them both and sided with neither.
+
+'Hello!' said Woodruff, flushing, and moving his long, clumsy
+limbs when she touched him on the shoulder. 'I'm just buying a few
+toys.'
+
+She helped him to buy toys, and then he asked her to go and have
+tea with him at the newly-opened Sub Rosa Tea Rooms, in Machin
+Street. She agreed, and, in passing the music-stool, gave a small
+parcel which she was carrying to Penkethman, and told him he might
+as well put it in the music-stool. She was glad to have tea with
+Charlie Woodruff. It would distract her, prevent her from
+thinking. The ecstasy had almost died out, and she had a violent
+desire not to think.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+A terrible blow fell upon her the next morning. Stephen had one of
+his bad colds, one of his worst. The mere cold she could have
+supported with fortitude, but he was forced to remain indoors, and
+his presence in the house she could not support with fortitude.
+The music-stool would be sure to arrive before lunch, and he would
+be there to see it arrive. The ecstasy had fully expired now, and
+she had more leisure to think than she wanted. She could not
+imagine what mad instinct had compelled her to buy the music-
+stool. (Once out of the shop these instincts always are difficult
+to imagine.) She knew that Stephen would be angry. He might
+perhaps go to the length of returning the music-stool whence it
+came. For, though she was a pretty and pampered woman, Stephen had
+a way, in the last resort, of being master of his own house. And
+she could not even placate him with the gift of a cigar-cabinet.
+She could not buy a five-guinea cigar-cabinet with ten and six.
+She had no other money in the world. She never had money, yet
+money was always running through her fingers. Stephen treated her
+generously, gave her an ample allowance, but he would under no
+circumstances permit credit, nor would he pay her allowance in
+advance. She had nothing to expect till the New Year.
+
+She attended to his cold, and telephoned to the works for a clerk
+to come up, and she refrained from telling Stephen that he must
+have been very careless while in London, to catch a cold like
+that. Her self-denial in this respect surprised Stephen, but he
+put it down to the beneficent influence of Christmas and the
+Venetian vases.
+
+Bostock's pair-horse van arrived before the garden gate earlier
+than her worse fears had anticipated, and Bostock's men were
+evidently in a tremendous hurry that morning. In quite an
+abnormally small number of seconds the wooden case containing the
+fragile music-stool was lying in the inner hall, waiting to be
+unpacked. Having signed the delivery-book Vera stood staring at
+the accusatory package. Stephen was lounging over the dining-room
+fire, perhaps dozing. She would have the thing swiftly transported
+up-stairs and hidden in an attic for a time.
+
+But just then Stephen popped out of the dining-room. Stephen's
+masculine curiosity had been aroused by the advent of Bostock's
+van. He had observed the incoming of the package from the window,
+and he had ventured to the hall to inspect it. The event had
+roused him wonderfully from the heavy torpor which a cold induces.
+He wore a dressing-gown, the pockets of which bulged with
+handkerchiefs.
+
+'You oughtn't to be out here, Stephen,' said his wife.
+
+'Nonsense!' he said. 'Why, upon my soul, this steam heat is warmer
+than the dining-room fire.' Vera, silenced by the voice of truth,
+could not reply.
+
+Stephen bent his great height to inspect the package. It was an
+appetizing Christmas package; straw escaped from between its ribs,
+and it had an air of being filled with something at once large and
+delicate.
+
+'Oh!' observed Stephen, humorously. 'Ah! So this is it, is it? Ah!
+Oh! Very good!'
+
+And he walked round it.
+
+How on earth had he learnt that she had bought it? She had not
+mentioned the purchase to Mr Woodruff.
+
+'Yes, Stephen,' she said timidly. 'That's it, and I hope--'
+
+'It ought to hold a tidy few cigars, that ought,' remarked Stephen
+complacently.
+
+He took it for the cigar-cabinet!
+
+She paused, struck. She had to make up her mind in an instant.
+
+'Oh yes,' she murmured.
+
+'A thousand?'
+
+'Yes, a thousand,' she said.
+
+'I thought so,' murmured Stephen. 'I mustn't kiss you, because
+I've got a cold,' said he. 'But, all the same I'm awfully obliged,
+Vera. Suppose we have it opened now, eh? Then we could decide
+where it is to go, and I could put my cigars in it.'
+
+'Oh no,' she protested. 'Oh no, Stephen! That's not fair! It
+mustn't be opened before Christmas morning.'
+
+'But I gave you my vases yesterday.'
+
+'That's different,' she said. 'Christmas is Christmas.' 'Oh, very
+well,' he yielded. 'That's all right, my dear.'
+
+Then he began to sniff.
+
+'There's a deuced odd smell from it,' he said.
+
+'Perhaps it's the wood!' she faltered.
+
+'I hope it isn't,' he said. 'I expect it's the straw. A deuced odd
+smell. We'll have the thing put in the side hall, next to the
+clock. It will be out of the way there. And I can come and gaze at
+it when I feel depressed. Eh, Maria?' He was undoubtedly charmed
+at the prospect of owning so large and precious a cigar-cabinet.
+
+Considering that the parcel which she had given to Penkethman to
+put in the music-stool comprised a half-a-pound of Bostock's very
+ripest Gorgonzola cheese, bought at the cook's special request,
+the smell which proceeded from the mysterious inwards of the
+packing-case did not surprise Vera at all. But it disconcerted her
+none the less. And she wondered how she could get the cheese out.
+
+For thirty hours the smell from the unopened packing-case waxed in
+vigour and strength. Stephen's cold grew worse and prevented him
+from appreciating its full beauty, but he savoured enough of it to
+induce him to compare it facetiously to the effluvium of a dead
+rat, and he said several times that Bostock's really ought to use
+better straw. He was frequently to be seen in the hall, gloating
+over his cigar-cabinet. Once he urged Vera to have it opened and
+so get rid of the straw, but she refused, and found the nerve to
+tell him that he was exaggerating the odour.
+
+She was at a loss what to do. She could not get up in the middle
+of the night and unpack the package and hide its guilty secret.
+Indeed, to unpack the package would bring about her ruin
+instantly; for, the package unpacked, Stephen would naturally
+expect to see the cigar-cabinet. And so the hours crept on to
+Christmas and Vera's undoing. She gave herself a headache.
+
+It was just thirty hours after the arrival of the package when Mr
+Woodruff dropped in for tea. Stephen was asleep in the dining-
+room, which apartment he particularly affected during his colds.
+Woodruff was shown into the drawing-room, where Vera was having
+her headache. Vera brightened. In fact, she suddenly grew very
+bright. And she gave Woodruff tea, and took some herself, and
+Woodruff passed an enjoyable twenty minutes.
+
+The two Venetian vases were on the mantelpiece. Vera rose into
+ecstasies about them, and called upon Charlie Woodruff to rise
+too. He got up from his chair to examine the vases, which Vera had
+placed close together side by side at the corner of the
+mantelpiece nearest to him. Vera and Woodruff also stood close
+together side by side. And just as Woodruff was about to handle
+the vases, Vera knocked his arm; his arm collided with one vase;
+that vase collided with the next, and both fell to earth--to the
+hard, unfeeling, unyielding tiles of the hearth.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+They were smashed to atoms.
+
+Vera screamed. She screamed twice, and ran out of the room.
+
+'Stephen, Stephen!' she cried hysterically. 'Charlie has broken my
+vases, both of them. It IS too bad of him. He's really too
+clumsy!'
+
+There was a terrific pother. Stephen wakened violently, and in a
+moment all three were staring ineffectually at the thousand
+crystal fragments on the hearth.
+
+'But--' began Charlie Woodruff.
+
+And that was all he did say.
+
+He and Vera and Stephen had been friends since infancy, so she had
+the right not to conceal her feelings before him; Stephen had the
+same right. They both exercised it.
+
+'But--' began Charlie again.
+
+'Oh, never mind,' Stephen stopped him curtly. 'Accidents can't be
+helped.'
+
+'I shall get another pair,' said Woodruff.
+
+'No, you won't,' replied Stephen. 'You can't. There isn't another
+pair in the world. See?'
+
+The two men simultaneously perceived that Vera was weeping. She
+was very pretty in tears, but that did not prevent the masculine
+world from feeling awkward and self-conscious. Charlie had notions
+about going out and burying himself.
+
+'Come, Vera, come,' her husband enjoined, blowing his nose with
+unnecessary energy, bad as his cold was.
+
+'I--I liked those vases more than anything you've--you've ever
+given me,' Vera blubbered, charmingly, patting her eyes.
+
+Stephen glanced at Woodruff, as who should say: 'Well, my boy, you
+uncorked those tears, I'll leave you to deal with 'em. You see,
+I'm an invalid in a dressing-gown. I leave you.'
+
+And went.
+
+'No-but-look-here-I-say,' Charlie Woodruff expostulated to Vera
+when he was alone with her--he often started an expostulation with
+that singular phrase. 'I'm awfully sorry. I don't know how it
+happened. You must let me give you something else.'
+
+Vera shook her head.
+
+'No,' she said. 'I wanted Stephen awfully to give me that music-
+stool that I told you about a fortnight ago. But he gave me the
+vases instead, and I liked them ever so much better.'
+
+'I shall give you the music-stool. If you wanted it a fortnight
+ago, you want it now. It won't make up for the vases, of course,
+but--'
+
+'No, no,' said Vera, positively.
+
+'Why not?'
+
+'I do not wish you to give me anything. It wouldn't be quite
+nice,' Vera insisted.
+
+'But I give you something every Christmas.'
+
+'Do you?' asked Vera, innocently.
+
+'Yes, and you and Stephen give me something.'
+
+'Besides, Stephen doesn't quite like the music-stool.'
+
+'What's that got to do with it? You like it. I'm giving it to you,
+not to him. I shall go over to Bostock's tomorrow morning and get
+it.'
+
+'I forbid you to.'
+
+'I shall.'
+
+Woodruff departed.
+
+Within five minutes the Cheswardine coachman was driving off in
+the dogcart to Hanbridge, with the packing-case in the back of the
+cart, and a note. He brought back the cigar-cabinet. Stephen had
+not stirred from the dining-room, afraid to encounter a tearful
+wife. Presently his wife came into the dining-room bearing the
+vast load of the cigar-cabinet in her delicate arms.
+
+'I thought it might amuse you to fill it with your cigars--just to
+pass the time,' she said.
+
+Stephen's thought was: 'Well, women take the cake.' It was a
+thought that occurs frequently to the husbands of Veras.
+
+There was ripe Gorgonzola at dinner. Stephen met it as one meets a
+person whom one fancies one has met somewhere but cannot remember
+where.
+
+The next afternoon the music-stool came, for the second time, into
+the house. Charlie brought it in HIS dogcart. It was unpacked
+ostentatiously by the radiant Vera. What could Stephen say in
+depreciation of this gift from their oldest and best friend? As a
+fact he could and did say a great deal. But he said it when he
+happened to be all alone in the drawing-room, and had observed the
+appalling way in which the music-stool did not 'go' with the
+Chippendale.
+
+'Look at the d--thing!' he exclaimed to himself. 'Look at it!'
+
+However, the Christmas dinner-party was a brilliant success, and
+after it Vera sat on the art nouveau music-stool and twittered
+songs, and what with her being so attractive and birdlike, and
+what with the Christmas feeling in the air... well, Stephen
+resigned himself to the music-stool.
+
+
+
+
+THE MURDER OF THE MANDARIN
+
+I
+
+
+'What's that you're saying about murder?' asked Mrs Cheswardine as
+she came into the large drawing-room, carrying the supper-tray.
+
+'Put it down here,' said her husband, referring to the supper-
+tray, and pointing to a little table which stood two legs off and
+two legs on the hearth-rug.
+
+'That apron suits you immensely,' murmured Woodruff, the friend of
+the family, as he stretched his long limbs into the fender towards
+the fire, farther even than the long limbs of Cheswardine. Each
+man occupied an easy-chair on either side of the hearth; each was
+very tall, and each was forty.
+
+Mrs Cheswardine, with a whisk infinitely graceful, set the tray on
+the table, took a seat behind it on a chair that looked like a
+toddling grand-nephew of the arm-chairs, and nervously smoothed
+out the apron.
+
+As a matter of fact, the apron did suit her immensely. It is
+astounding, delicious, adorable, the effect of a natty little
+domestic apron suddenly put on over an elaborate and costly frock,
+especially when you can hear the rustle of a silk petticoat
+beneath, and more especially when the apron is smoothed out by
+jewelled fingers. Every man knows this. Every woman knows it. Mrs
+Cheswardine knew it. In such matters Mrs Cheswardine knew exactly
+what she was about. She delighted, when her husband brought
+Woodruff in late of a night, as he frequently did after a turn at
+the club, to prepare with her own hands--the servants being in
+bed--a little snack of supper for them. Tomato sandwiches, for
+instance, miraculously thin, together with champagne or Bass. The
+men preferred Bass, naturally, but if Mrs Cheswardine had a fancy
+for a sip of champagne out of her husband's tumbler, Bass was not
+forthcoming.
+
+Tonight it was champagne.
+
+Woodruff opened it, as he always did, and involuntarily poured out
+a libation on the hearth, as he almost always did. Good-natured,
+ungainly, long-suffering men seldom achieve the art of opening
+champagne.
+
+Mrs Cheswardine tapped her pink-slippered foot impatiently.
+
+'You're all nerves tonight,' Woodruff laughed, 'and you've made me
+nervous,' And at length he got some of the champagne into a
+tumbler.
+
+'No, I'm not,' Mrs Cheswardine contradicted him.
+
+'Yes, you are, Vera,' Woodruff insisted calmly.
+
+She smiled. The use of that elegant Christian name, with its faint
+suggestion of Russian archduchesses, had a strange effect on her,
+particularly from the lips of Woodruff. She was proud of it, and
+of her surname too--one of the oldest surnames in the Five Towns.
+The syllables of 'Vera' invariably soothed her, like a charm.
+Woodruff, and Cheswardine also, had called her Vera during the
+whole of her life; and she was thirty. They had all three lived in
+different houses at the top end of Trafalgar Road, Bursley.
+Woodruff fell in love with her first, when she was eighteen, but
+with no practical result. He was a brown-haired man, personable
+despite his ungainliness, but he failed to perceive that to
+worship from afar off is not the best way to capture a young woman
+with large eyes and an emotional disposition. Cheswardine, who had
+a black beard, simply came along and married the little thing. She
+fluttered down on to his shoulders like a pigeon. She adored him,
+feared him, cooed to him, worried him, and knew that there were
+depths of his mind which she would never plumb. Woodruff, after
+being best man, went on loving, meekly and yet philosophically,
+and found his chief joy in just these suppers. The arrangement
+suited Vera; and as for the husband and the hopeless admirer, they
+had always been fast friends.
+
+'I asked you what you were saying about murder,' said Vera
+sharply, 'but it seems--'
+
+'Oh! did you?' Woodruff apologized. 'I was saying that murder
+isn't such an impossible thing as it appears. Anyone might commit
+a murder.'
+
+'Then you want to defend, Harrisford? Do you hear what he says,
+Stephen?'
+
+The notorious and terrible Harrisford murders were agitating the
+Five Towns that November. People read, talked, and dreamt murder;
+for several weeks they took murder to all their meals.
+
+'He doesn't want to defend Harrisford at all,' said Cheswardine,
+with a superior masculine air, 'and of course anyone might commit
+a murder. I might.'
+
+'Stephen! How horrid you are!' 'You might, even!' said Woodruff,
+gazing at Vera.
+
+'Charlie! Why, the blood alone--'
+
+'There isn't always blood,' said the oracular husband.
+
+'Listen here,' proceeded Woodruff, who read variously and enjoyed
+philosophical speculation. 'Supposing that by just taking thought,
+by just wishing it, an Englishman could kill a mandarin in China
+and make himself rich for life, without anybody knowing anything
+about it! How many mandarins do you suppose there would be left in
+China at the end of a week!'
+
+'At the end of twenty-four hours, rather,' said Cheswardine
+grimly.
+
+'Not one,' said Woodruff.
+
+'But that's absurd,' Vera objected, disturbed. When these two men
+began their philosophical discussions they always succeeded in
+disturbing her. She hated to see life in a queer light. She hated
+to think.
+
+'It isn't absurd,' Woodruff replied. 'It simply shows that what
+prevents wholesale murder is not the wickedness of it, but the
+fear of being found out, and the general mess, and seeing the
+corpse, and so on.'
+
+Vera shuddered.
+
+'And I'm not sure,' Woodruff proceeded, 'that murder is so very
+much more wicked than lots of other things.'
+
+'Usury, for instance,' Cheswardine put in.
+
+'Or bigamy,' said Woodruff.
+
+'But an Englishman COULDN'T kill a mandarin in China by just
+wishing it,' said Vera, looking up.
+
+'How do we know?' said Woodruff, in his patient voice. 'How do we
+know? You remember what I was telling you about thought-
+transference last week. It was in Borderland.'
+
+Vera felt as if there was no more solid ground to stand on, and it
+angered her to be plunging about in a bog.
+
+'I think it's simply silly,' she remarked. 'No, thanks.'
+
+She said 'No, thanks' to her husband, when he tendered his glass.
+
+He moved the glass still closer to her lips.
+
+'I said "No, thanks,"' she repeated dryly.
+
+'Just a mouthful,' he urged.
+
+'I'm not thirsty.'
+
+'Then you'd better go to bed,' said he.
+
+He had a habit of sending her to bed abruptly. She did not dislike
+it. But she had various ways of going. Tonight it was the way of
+an archduchess.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Woodruff, in stating that Vera was all nerves that evening, was
+quite right. She was. And neither her husband nor Woodruff knew
+the reason.
+
+The reason had to do most intimately with frocks.
+
+Vera had been married ten years. But no one would have guessed it,
+to watch her girlish figure and her birdlike ways. You see, she
+was the only child in the house. She often bitterly regretted the
+absence of offspring to the name and honour of Cheswardine. She
+envied other wives their babies. She doted on babies. She said
+continually that in her deliberate opinion the proper mission of
+women was babies. She was the sort of woman that regards a
+cathedral as a place built especially to sit in and dream soft
+domestic dreams; the sort of woman that adores music simply
+because it makes her dream. And Vera's brown studies, which were
+frequent, consisted chiefly of babies. But as babies amused
+themselves by coming down the chimneys of all the other houses in
+Bursley, and avoiding her house, she sought comfort in frocks. She
+made the best of herself. And it was a good best. Her figure was
+as near perfect as a woman's can be, and then there were those
+fine emotional eyes, and that flutteringness of the pigeon, and an
+ever-changing charm of gesture. Vera had become the best-dressed
+woman in Bursley. And that is saying something. Her husband was
+wealthy, with an increasing income, though, of course, as an
+earthenware manufacturer, and the son and grandson of an
+earthenware manufacturer, he joined heartily in the general Five
+Towns lamentation that there was no longer any money to be made
+out of 'pots'. He liked to have a well-dressed woman about the
+house, and he allowed her an incredible allowance, the amount of
+which was breathed with awe among Vera's friends; a hundred a
+year, in fact. He paid it to her quarterly, by cheque. Such was
+his method.
+
+Now a ball was to be given by the members of the Ladies' Hockey
+Club (or such of them as had not been maimed for life in the
+pursuit of this noble pastime) on the very night after the
+conversation about murder. Vera belonged to the Hockey Club (in a
+purely ornamental sense), and she had procured a frock for the
+ball which was calculated to crown her reputation as a mirror of
+elegance. The skirt had--but no (see the columns of the
+Staffordshire Signal for the 9th November, 1901). The mischief was
+that the gown lacked, for its final perfection, one particular
+thing, and that particular thing was separated from Vera by the
+glass front of Brunt's celebrated shop at Hanbridge. Vera could
+have managed without it. The gown would still have been brilliant
+without it. But Vera had seen it, and she WANTED it.
+
+Its cost was a guinea. Well, you will say, what is a guinea to a
+dainty creature with a hundred a year? Let her go and buy the
+article. The point is that she couldn't, because she had only six
+and sevenpence left in the wide world. (And six weeks to
+Christmas!) She had squandered--oh, soul above money!--twenty-five
+pounds, and more than twenty-five pounds, since the 29th of
+September. Well, you will say, credit, in other words, tick? No,
+no, no! The giant Stephen absolutely and utterly forbade her to
+procure anything whatever on credit. She was afraid of him. She
+knew just how far she could go with Stephen. He was great and
+terrible. Well, you will say, why couldn't she blandish and cajole
+Stephen for a sovereign or so? Impossible! She had a hundred a
+year on the clear understanding that it was never exceeded nor
+anticipated. Well, you will discreetly hint, there are certain
+devices known to housewives.... Hush! Vera had already employed
+them. Six and sevenpence was not merely all that remained to her
+of her dress allowance; it was all that remained to her of her
+household allowance till the next Monday.
+
+Hence her nerves.
+
+There that poor unfortunate woman lay, with her unconscious tyrant
+of a husband snoring beside her, desolately wakeful under the
+night-light in the large, luxurious bedroom--three servants
+sleeping overhead, champagne in the cellar, furs in the wardrobe,
+valuable lace round her neck at that very instant, grand piano in
+the drawing-room, horses in the stable, stuffed bear in the hall--
+and her life was made a blank for want of fourteen and fivepence!
+And she had nobody to confide in. How true it is that the human
+soul is solitary, that content is the only true riches, and that
+to be happy we must be good!
+
+It was at that juncture of despair that she thought of mandarins.
+Or rather--I may as well be frank--she had been thinking of
+mandarins all the time since retiring to rest. There MIGHT be
+something in Charlie's mandarin theory.... According to Charlie,
+so many queer, inexplicable things happened in the world. Occult--
+subliminal--astral--thoughtwaves. These expressions and many more
+occurred to her as she recollected Charlie's disconcerting
+conversations. There MIGHT.... One never knew.
+
+Suddenly she thought of her husband's pockets, bulging with
+silver, with gold, and with bank-notes. Tantalizing vision! No!
+She could not steal. Besides, he might wake up.
+
+And she returned to mandarins. She got herself into a very morbid
+and two-o'clock-in-the-morning state of mind. Suppose it was a
+dodge that DID work. (Of course, she was extremely superstitious;
+we all are.) She began to reflect seriously upon China. She
+remembered having heard that Chinese mandarins were very corrupt;
+that they ground the faces of the poor, and put innocent victims
+to the torture; in short, that they were sinful and horrid
+persons, scoundrels unfit for mercy. Then she pondered upon the
+remotest parts of China, regions where Europeans never could
+penetrate. No doubt there was some unimportant mandarin, somewhere
+in these regions, to whose district his death would be a decided
+blessing, to kill whom would indeed be an act of humanity.
+Probably a mandarin without wife or family; a bachelor mandarin
+whom no relative would regret; or, in the alternative, a mandarin
+with many wives, whose disgusting polygamy merited severe
+punishment! An old mandarin already pretty nearly dead; or, in the
+alternative, a young one just commencing a career of infamy!
+
+'I'm awfully silly,' she whispered to herself. 'But still, if
+there SHOULD be anything in it. And I must, I must, I must have
+that thing for my dress!'
+
+She looked again at the dim forms of her husband's clothes,
+pitched anyhow on an ottoman. No! She could not stoop to theft!
+
+So she murdered a mandarin; lying in bed there; not any particular
+mandarin, a vague mandarin, the mandarin most convenient and
+suitable under all the circumstances. She deliberately wished him
+dead, on the off-chance of acquiring riches, or, more accurately,
+because she was short of fourteen and fivepence in order to look
+perfectly splendid at a ball.
+
+In the morning when she woke up--her husband had already departed
+to the works--she thought how foolish she had been in the night.
+She did not feel sorry for having desired the death of a fellow-
+creature. Not at all. She felt sorry because she was convinced, in
+the cold light of day, that the charm would not work. Charlie's
+notions were really too ridiculous, too preposterous. No! She must
+reconcile herself to wearing a ball dress which was less than
+perfection, and all for the want of fourteen and fivepence. And
+she had more nerves than ever!
+
+She had nerves to such an extent that when she went to unlock the
+drawer of her own private toilet-table, in which her prudent and
+fussy husband forced her to lock up her rings and brooches every
+night, she attacked the wrong drawer--an empty unfastened drawer
+that she never used. And lo! the empty drawer was not empty. There
+was a sovereign lying in it!
+
+This gave her a start, connecting the discovery, as naturally at
+the first blush she did, with the mandarin.
+
+Surely it couldn't be, after all.
+
+Then she came to her senses. What absurdity! A coincidence, of
+course, nothing else? Besides, a mere sovereign! It wasn't enough.
+Charlie had said 'rich for life'. The sovereign must have lain
+there for months and months, forgotten.
+
+However, it was none the less a sovereign. She picked it up,
+thanked Providence, ordered the dog-cart, and drove straight to
+Brunt's. The particular thing that she acquired was an exceedingly
+thin, slim, and fetching silver belt--a marvel for the money, and
+the ideal waist decoration for her wonderful white muslin gown.
+She bought it, and left the shop.
+
+And as she came out of the shop, she saw a street urchin holding
+out the poster of the early edition of the Signal. And she read on
+the poster, in large letters: 'DEATH OF LI HUNG CHANG.' It is no
+exaggeration to say that she nearly fainted. Only by the exercise
+of that hard self-control, of which women alone are capable, did
+she refrain from tumbling against the blue-clad breast of Adams,
+the Cheswardine coachman.
+
+She purchased the Signal with well-feigned calm, opened it and
+read: 'Stop-press news. Pekin. Li Hung Chang, the celebrated
+Chinese statesman, died at two o'clock this morning.--Reuter.'
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Vera reclined on the sofa that afternoon, and the sofa was drawn
+round in front of the drawing-room fire. And she wore her
+fluffiest and languidest peignoir. And there was a perfume of eau
+de Cologne in the apartment. Vera was having a headache; she was
+having it in her grand, her official manner. Stephen had had to
+lunch alone. He had been told that in all probability his
+suffering wife would not be well enough to go to the ball.
+Whereupon he had grunted. As a fact, Vera's headache was extremely
+real, and she was very upset indeed.
+
+The death of Li Hung Chang was heavy on her soul. Occultism was
+justified of itself. The affair lay beyond coincidence. She had
+always KNOWN that there was something in occultism,
+supernaturalism, so-called superstitions, what not. But she had
+never expected to prove the faith that was in her by such a
+homicidal act on her own part. It was detestable of Charlie to
+have mentioned the thing at all. He had no right to play with
+fire. And as for her husband, words could give but the merest
+rough outline of her resentment against Stephen. A pretty state of
+things that a woman with a position such as she had to keep up
+should be reduced to six and sevenpence! Stephen, no doubt,
+expected her to visit the pawnshop. It would serve him right if
+she did so--and he met her coming out under the three brass balls!
+Did she not dress solely and wholly to please him? Not in the
+least to please herself! Personally she had a mind set on higher
+things, impossible aspirations. But he liked fine clothes. And it
+was her duty to satisfy him. She strove to satisfy him in all
+matters. She lived for him. She sacrificed herself to him
+completely. And what did she get in return? Nothing! Nothing!
+Nothing! All men were selfish. And women were their victims....
+Stephen, with his silly bullying rules against credit and so
+forth.... The worst of men was that they had no sense.
+
+She put a new dose of eau de Cologne on her forehead, and leaned
+on one elbow. On the mantelpiece lay the tissue parcel containing
+the slim silver belt, the price of Li's death. She wanted to stick
+it in the fire. And only the fact that it would not burn prevented
+her savagely doing so. There was something wrong, too, with the
+occultism. To receive a paltry sovereign for murdering the
+greatest statesman of the Eastern hemisphere was simply grotesque.
+Moreover, she had most distinctly not wanted to deprive China of a
+distinguished man. She had expressly stipulated for an inferior
+and insignificant mandarin, one that could be spared and that was
+unknown to Reuter. She supposed she ought to have looked up China
+at the Wedgwood Institution and selected a definite mandarin with
+a definite place of residence. But could she be expected to go
+about a murder deliberately like that?
+
+With regard to the gross inadequacy of the fiscal return for her
+deed, perhaps that was her own fault. She had not wished for more.
+Her brain had been so occupied by the belt that she had wished
+only for the belt. But, perhaps, on the other hand, vast wealth
+was to come. Perhaps something might occur that very night. That
+would be better. Yet would it be better? However rich she might
+become, Stephen would coolly take charge of her riches, and dole
+them out to her, and make rules for her concerning them. And
+besides, Charlie would suspect her guilt. Charlie understood her,
+and perused her thoughts far better than Stephen did. She would
+never be able to conceal the truth from Charlie. The conversation,
+the death of Li within two hours, and then a sudden fortune
+accruing to her--Charlie would inevitably put two and two together
+and divine her shameful secret.
+
+The outlook was thoroughly black anyway.
+
+She then fell asleep.
+
+When she awoke, some considerable time afterwards, Stephen was
+calling to her. It was his voice, indeed, that had aroused her.
+The room was dark.
+
+'I say, Vera,' he demanded, in a low, slightly inimical tone,
+'have you taken a sovereign out of the empty drawer in your
+toilet-table?'
+
+'No,' she said quickly, without thinking.
+
+'Ah!' he observed reflectively, 'I knew I was right.' He paused,
+and added, coldly, 'If you aren't better you ought to go to bed.'
+
+Then he left her, shutting the door with a noise that showed a
+certain lack of sympathy with her headache.
+
+She sprang up. Her first feeling was one of thankfulness that that
+brief interview had occurred in darkness. So Stephen was aware of
+the existence of the sovereign! The sovereign was not occult.
+Possibly he had put it there. And what did he know he was 'right'
+about?
+
+She lighted the gas, and gazed at herself in the glass, realizing
+that she no longer had a headache, and endeavouring to arrange her
+ideas.
+
+'What's this?' said another voice at the door. She glanced round
+hastily, guiltily. It was Charlie.
+
+'Steve telephoned me you were too ill to go to the dance,'
+explained Charlie, 'so I thought I'd come and make inquiries. I
+quite expected to find you in bed with a nurse and a doctor or two
+at least. What is it?' He smiled.
+
+'Nothing,' she replied. 'Only a headache. It's gone now.'
+
+She stood against the mantelpiece, so that he should not see the
+white parcel.
+
+'That's good,' said Charlie.
+
+There was a pause.
+
+'Strange, Li Hung Chang dying last night, just after we had been
+talking about killing mandarins,' she said. She could not keep off
+the subject. It attracted her like a snake, and she approached it
+in spite of the fact that she fervently wished not to approach it.
+
+'Yes,' said Charlie. 'But Li wasn't a mandarin, you know. And he
+didn't die after we had been talking about mandarins. He died
+before.'
+
+'Oh! I thought it said in the paper he died at two o'clock this
+morning.'
+
+'Two a.m. in Pekin,' Charlie answered. 'You must remember that
+Pekin time is many hours earlier than our time. It lies so far
+eastward.'
+
+'Oh!' she said again.
+
+Stephen hurried in, with a worried air.
+
+'Ah! It's you, Charlie!'
+
+'She isn't absolutely dying, I find,' said Charlie, turning to
+Vera: 'You are going to the dance after all--aren't you?'
+
+'I say, Vera,' Stephen interrupted, 'either you or I must have a
+scene with Martha. I've always suspected that confounded
+housemaid. So I put a marked sovereign in a drawer this morning,
+and it was gone at lunch-time. She'd better hook it instantly. Of
+course I shan't prosecute.'
+
+'Martha!' cried Vera. 'Stephen, what on earth are you thinking of?
+I wish you would leave the servants to me. If you think you can
+manage this house in your spare time from the works, you are
+welcome to try. But don't blame me for the consequences.' Glances
+of triumph flashed in her eyes.
+
+'But I tell you--'
+
+'Nonsense,' said Vera. 'I took the sovereign. I saw it there and I
+took it, and just to punish you, I've spent it. It's not at all
+nice to lay traps for servants like that.'
+
+'Then why did you tell me just now you hadn't taken it?' Stephen
+demanded crossly.
+
+'I didn't feel well enough to argue with you then,' Vera replied.
+
+'You've recovered precious quick,' retorted Stephen with grimness.
+
+'Of course, if you want to make a scene before strangers,' Vera
+whimpered (poor Charlie a stranger!), 'I'll go to bed.'
+
+Stephen knew when he was beaten.
+
+She went to the Hockey dance, though. She and Stephen and Charlie
+and his young sister, aged seventeen, all descended together to
+the Town Hall in a brougham. The young girl admired Vera's belt
+excessively, and looked forward to the moment when she too should
+be a bewitching and captivating wife like Vera, in short, a woman
+of the world, worshipped by grave, bearded men. And both the men
+were under the spell of Vera's incurable charm, capricious,
+surprising, exasperating, indefinable, indispensable to their
+lives.
+
+'Stupid superstitions!' reflected Vera. 'But of course I never
+believed it really.'
+
+And she cast down her eyes to gloat over the belt.
+
+
+
+
+VERA'S SECOND CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE
+
+
+Curious and strange things had a way of happening to Vera--
+perhaps because she was an extremely feminine woman. But of all
+the curious and strange things that ever did happen to Vera, this
+was certainly the strangest and the most curious. It makes a
+somewhat exasperating narrative, because the affair ended--or,
+rather, Vera caused it to end--on a note of interrogation. The
+reader may, however, draw consolation from the fact that, if he is
+tormented by an unanswerable query, Vera herself was much more
+tormented by precisely the same query.
+
+Two days before Christmas, at about three o'clock in the
+afternoon, just when it was getting dusk and the distant smokepall
+of the Five Towns was merging in the general greyness of the
+northern sky, Vera was sitting in the bow-window of the drawing-
+room of Stephen Cheswardine's newly-acquired house at Sneyd; Sneyd
+being the fashionable suburb of the Five Towns, graced by the near
+presence of a countess. And as the slim, thirty-year-old Vera sat
+there, moody (for reasons which will soon appear), in her charming
+teagown, her husband drove up to the door in the dogcart, and he
+was not alone. He had with him a man of vigorous and dashing
+appearance, fair, far from ugly, and with a masterful face, keen
+eyes, and most magnificent furs round about him. At sight of the
+visitor Vera's heart did not exactly jump, but it nearly jumped.
+
+Presently, Stephen brought his acquaintance into the drawing-
+room.
+
+"My wife," said Stephen, rubbing his hands. "Vera, this is Mr
+Bittenger, of New York. He will give us the pleasure of spending
+the night here."
+
+And now Vera's little heart really did jump.
+
+She behaved with the delicious wayward grace which she could
+always command when she chose to command it. No one would have
+guessed that she had not spoken to Stephen for a week.
+
+'I'm most happy--most happy,' said Mr Bittenger, with a marked
+accent and a fine complimentary air. And obviously he was most
+happy. Vera had impressed him. There was nothing surprising in
+that. She was in the fullness of her powers in that direction.
+
+It is at this point--at the point of the first jumping of Vera's
+heart--that the tale begins to be uncanny and disturbing. Thus
+runs the explanation.
+
+During the year Stephen had gradually grown more and more
+preoccupied with the subject of his own health. The earthenware
+business was very good, although, of course, manufacturers were
+complaining just as usual. Trade, indeed, flourished to such an
+extent that Stephen had pronounced himself to be suffering from
+nervous strain and overwork. The symptoms of his malady were
+chiefly connected with the assimilation of food; to be brief, it
+was dyspepsia. And as Stephen had previously been one of those
+favoured people who can eat anything at any hour, and arise in the
+best of health the next day, Stephen was troubled. At last--about
+August, when he was obliged to give up wine--he had suddenly
+decided that the grimy air of the Five Towns was bad for him, and
+that the household should be removed to Sneyd. And removed to
+Sneyd it accordingly was. The new house was larger and more
+splendid even than the Cheswardine abode at Bursley. But Vera did
+not like the change. Vera preferred the town. Nevertheless, she
+could not openly demur, since Stephen's health was supposed to be
+at stake.
+
+During the autumn she was tremendously bored at Sneyd. She had
+practically no audience for her pretty dresses, and her friends
+would not flock over from Bursley because of the difficulty of
+getting home at night. Then it was that Vera had the beautiful
+idea of spending Christmas in Switzerland. Someone had told her
+about a certain hotel called The Bear, where, on Christmas Day,
+never less than a hundred well-dressed and wealthy English people
+sat down to an orthodox Christmas dinner. The notion enchanted
+her. She decided, definitely, that she and Stephen should do their
+Christmassing at The Bear, wherever the Bear was. And as she was
+fully aware of the power of her capricious charm over Stephen, she
+regarded the excursion as arranged before she had broached it to
+him.
+
+Stephen refused. He remarked bitterly that the very thought of a
+mince-tart made him ill; and that he hated 'abroad'.
+
+Vera took her defeat badly.
+
+She pouted. She sulked. She announced that, if she was not to be
+allowed to do her Christmassing at The Bear, she would not do it
+anywhere. She indicated that she meant to perish miserably of
+ennui in the besotted dullness of Sneyd, and that no Christmas-
+party of any kind should occur in HER house. She ceased to show
+interest in Stephen's health. She would not speak. In fact, she
+went too far. One day, in reply to her rude silence, Stephen said:
+'Very well, child, if that's your game, I'll play it with you.
+Except when other people are present, not a word do I speak to you
+until you have first spoken to me.'
+
+She knew he would abide by that. He was a monster. She hated him.
+She loathed him (so she said to herself).
+
+That night, in the agony of her distress, she had dreamed a dream.
+She dreamed that a stranger came to the house. The details were
+vague, but the stranger had travelled many miles over water. She
+could not see him distinctly, but she knew that he was quite bald.
+In spite of his baldness he inspired her with sympathy. He
+understood her, praised her costumes, and treated a woman as a
+woman ought to be treated. Then, somehow or other, he was making
+love to her, the monster Stephen being absent. She was shocked by
+his making love to her, and she moved a little farther off him on
+the sofa (he had sat down by her on a vague sort of sofa in a
+vague sort of room); but still she was thrilled, and she could not
+feel as wicked as she felt she ought to feel. Then the dream
+became hazy; it became hazy at the interesting point of her answer
+to the love-making. A later stage was very clear. Something was
+afoot between the monster Stephen and the stranger in the dining-
+room, and she was locked out of the dining-room. It was Christmas
+night. She knocked frantically at the door, and at last forced it
+open, and Stephen was lying in the middle of the floor; the table
+had been pushed into a corner. 'I killed him quite by accident,'
+said the stranger affably. And then he seized her by the hand and
+ruthlessly dragged her away, away, away; and they travelled in
+trains and ships and trains, and they came to a very noisy,
+clanging sort of city--and Vera woke up. It had been a highly
+realistic dream, and it made a deep impression on Vera.
+
+Can one wonder that Vera's heart, being a superstitious little
+heart, like all our hearts, should leap when the very next day
+Stephen turned up with a completely unexpected stranger from New
+York? Of course, dreams are nonsense! Of course! Still--
+
+She did not know whether to rejoice or mourn over the fact that Mr
+Bittenger was not bald. He was decidedly unbald; he had a glorious
+shock of chestnut hair. That hair of his naturally destroyed any
+possible connection with the dream. None the less the coincidence
+was bizarre.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+That evening, before dinner, Vera, busy in her chamber beautifying
+her charms for the ravishment of men from New York, waited with
+secret anxiety for the arrival of Stephen in his dressing-room.
+And whereas she usually closed the door between the bedroom and
+the dressing-room, on this occasion she carefully left it wide
+open. Stephen came at last. And she waited, listening to his
+movements in the dressing-room. Not a word! She made brusque
+movements in the bedroom to attract his attention; she even
+dropped a brush on the floor. Not a word! After a few moments, she
+actually ventured into the dressing-room. Stephen was wiping his
+face, and he glanced at her momentarily over the towel, which hid
+his nose and mouth. Not a word! And how hard was the monster's
+glance! She felt that Stephen was one of your absurd literal
+persons. He had said that he would not speak to her until she had
+first spoken to him--that was to say in private--public
+performances did not count. And he would stick to his text, no
+matter how deliciously she behaved.
+
+She left the dressing-room in haste. Very well! Very well! If
+Stephen wished for war, he should have it. Her grievance against
+him grew into something immense. Before, it had been nothing but a
+kind of two-roomed cottage. She now erected it into a town hall,
+with imposing portals, and many windows and rich statuary, and
+suite after suite of enormous rooms, and marble staircases, and
+lifts that went up and down. She wished she had never married him.
+She wished that Mr Bittenger HAD been bald.
+
+At dinner everything went with admirable smoothness. Mr Bittenger
+sat betwixt them. And utmost politeness reigned. In their quality
+of well-bred hosts, they both endeavoured to keep Mr Bittenger at
+his ease despite their desolating quarrel; and they entirely
+succeeded. As the champagne disappeared (and it was not Stephen
+that drank it), Mr Bittenger became more than at his ease. He was
+buyer for an important firm of earthenware dealers in New York
+(Vera had suspected as much--these hospitalities to American
+buyers are an essential part of business in the Five Towns), and
+he related very drolly the series of chances or mischances that
+had left him stranded in England at that season so unseasonable
+for buying. Vera reflected upon the series of chances or
+mischances, and upon her dream of the man from over the long miles
+of water. Of course, dreams are nonsense.... But still--
+
+The conversation passed to the topic of Stephen's health, as
+conversations in Stephen's house had a habit of doing. Mr
+Bittenger listened with grave interest.
+
+'I know, I know!' said Mr Bittenger. 'I used to be exactly the
+same. I guess I understand how you feel--SOME! Don't I?'
+
+'And you are cured?' Stephen demanded, eagerly, as he nibbled at
+dry toast.
+
+'You bet I'm cured!' said Mr Bittenger.
+
+'You must tell me about that,' said Stephen, and added, 'some time
+tonight.' He did not care to discuss the bewildering internal
+economy of the human frame at his dinner-table. There were
+details...and Mr Bittenger was in a mood that it was no
+exaggeration to describe as gay.
+
+Shortly afterwards, there arose a discussion as to their
+respective ages. They coquetted for a few moments, as men
+invariably will, each diffident about giving away the secret, each
+asserting that the other was younger than himself.
+
+'Well,' said Mr Bittenger to Vera, at length, 'what age should you
+give me?'
+
+'I--I should give you five years less than Stephen,' Vera replied.
+
+'And may I ask just how old you are?' Mr Bittenger put the
+question at close range to Stephen, and hit him full in the face
+with it.
+
+'I'm forty,' said Stephen.
+
+'So am I!' said Mr Bittenger.
+
+'Well, you don't look it,' said Stephen.
+
+'Sure!' Mr Bittenger admitted, pleased.
+
+'My husband's hair is turning grey,' said Vera, 'while yours--'
+
+'Turning grey!' exclaimed Mr Bittender. 'I wish mine was. I'd give
+five thousand dollars today if mine was.'
+
+'But why--?' Vera smiled.
+
+'Look here, my dear lady,' said Mr Bittenger, in a peculiar voice,
+putting down his glass.
+
+And with a swift movement he lifted a wig of glorious chestnut
+hair from his head--just lifted it for an instant, and dropped it.
+The man was utterly and completely bald.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Vera did nothing foolish. She neither cried, screamed, turned
+deadly pale, clenched her fragile hands, bit her lips till the
+blood came, smashed a wine-glass, nor fell with a dull thud
+senseless to the floor. Nevertheless, she was extremely perturbed
+by this astounding revelation of Mr Bittenger's. Of course, dreams
+are nonsense. But still--The truth is, one tries to believe that
+dreams are nonsense, and up to a certain point one may succeed in
+believing. But it seemed to Vera that circumstances had passed
+that point. She could not but admit, also, that if the dream went
+on being fulfilled, within forty-eight hours Mr Bittenger would
+have made love to her, and would have killed her husband.
+
+She was so incensed against Stephen that she really could not
+decide whether she wanted the dream to be fulfilled or not. No one
+would have imagined that that soft breast could conceal a
+homicidal thought. Yet so it was. That pretty and delightful
+woman, wandering about in the edifice of her terrific grievance
+against Stephen, could not say positively to herself that she
+would not care to have Stephen killed as a punishment for his
+sins.
+
+After dinner, she found an excuse for retiring. She must think the
+puzzle out in solitude. Matters were really going too far. She
+allowed it to be understood that she was indisposed. Mr Bittenger
+was full of sorrow and sympathy. But did Stephen show the
+slightest concern? Stephen did not. She went upstairs, and she
+meditated, stretched on the sofa at the foot of the bed, a rug
+over her knees and the fire glinting on her face. Yes, it was her
+duty as a Christian, if not as an outraged wife, to warn Stephen
+that the shadow of death was creeping up behind him. He ought at
+least to be warned. But how could she warn him? Clearly she could
+not warn him in the presence of Mr Bittenger, the prospective
+murderer. She would, therefore, have to warn him when they were
+alone. And that meant that she would have to give way in the great
+conjugal sulking match. No, never! It was impossible that she
+should give way there! She frowned desperately at the leaping
+flames, and did ultimately decide that Stephen's death was
+preferable to her defeat in that contest. Of such is human nature.
+
+After all, dreams were nonsense.
+
+Surely Stephen would come upstairs to inquire about her health,
+her indisposition? But no! He came not. And, as he continued not
+to come, she went downstairs again and proclaimed that she was
+better.
+
+And then she learned that she had been worrying herself to no
+purpose whatever. Mr Bittenger was leaving on the morrow, the
+morrow being Christmas Eve. Stephen would drive him to Bursley in
+the morning. He would go to the Five Towns Hotel to get his
+baggage, and catch the Liverpool express at noon. He had booked a
+passage on the Saxonia, which sailed at threethirty o'clock. Thus
+he would spend his Christmas at sea; and, spending his Christmas
+at sea, he could not possibly kill Stephen in the village of Sneyd
+on Christmas night.
+
+Relief! And yet a certain vague regret in the superstitious little
+heart! The little heart went to bed again. And Stephen and the
+stranger stayed up talking very late--doubtless about the famous
+cure.
+
+The leave-taking the next morning increased the vague regret. Mr
+Bittenger was the possessor of an attractive individuality, and
+Vera pondered upon its attractiveness far into the afternoon. How
+nicely Mr Bittenger had thanked her for her gracious hospitality--
+with what meaning he had charged the expression of his deep regret
+at leaving her!
+
+After all, dreams WERE nonsense.
+
+She was sitting in the bow-window of the drawing-room, precisely
+as she had been sitting twenty-four hours previously, when whom
+should she see, striding masculinely along the drive towards the
+house, but Mr Bittenger?
+
+This time she was much more perturbed even than she had been by
+the revelation of Mr Bittenger's baldness.
+
+After all--
+
+She uprose, the blood having rushed to her head, and retreated she
+knew not whither, blindly, without a purpose. And found herself in
+a little morning-room which was scarcely ever used, at the end of
+the hall. She had not shut the door. And Mr Bittenger, having been
+admitted by a servant, caught sight of her, and breezily entered
+her retreat, clad in his magnificent furs.
+
+And as he doffed the furs, he gaily told her what had happened.
+Owing to difficulties with the Cheswardine mare on the frosty,
+undulating road between Sneyd and Bursley, and owing to delays
+with his baggage at the Five Towns Hotel, he had just missed the
+Liverpool express, and, therefore, the steamer also. He had
+returned to Stephen's manufactory. Stephen had insisted that he
+should spend his Christmas with them. And, in brief, there he was.
+He had walked from Bursley. Stephen, kept by business, was coming
+later, and so was some of the baggage.
+
+Mr Bittenger's face radiated joy. The loss of his twenty-guinea
+passage on the Saxonia did not appear to cause him the least
+regret.
+
+And he sat down by the side of Vera.
+
+And Vera suddenly noticed that they were on a sofa--the sofa of
+her dream--and she fancied she recognized the room.
+
+'You know, my dear lady,' said Mr Bittenger, looking her straight
+in the eyes, 'I'm just GLAD I missed my steamer. It gives me a
+chance to spend a Christmas in England, and in your delightful
+society--your delightful society--' He gazed at her, without
+adding to the sentence.
+
+If this was not love-making on a sofa, what could be?
+
+Mr Bittenger had certainly missed the Liverpool express on
+purpose. Of that Vera was convinced. Or, if he had not missed it
+on purpose, he had missed it under the dictates of the mysterious
+power of the dream. Those people who chose to believe that dreams
+are nonsense were at liberty to do so.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+So that in spite of Vera's definite proclamation that there should
+be no Christmassing in her house that year, Christmassing there
+emphatically was. Impossible to deny anything to Mr Bittenger! Mr
+Bittenger wanted holly, the gardener supplied it. Mr Bittenger
+wanted mistletoe, a bunch of it was brought home by Stephen in the
+dogcart. Mr Bittenger could not conceive an English Christmas
+without turkey, mince-pies, plum-pudding, and all the usual
+indigestiveness. Vera, speaking in a voice which seemed somehow
+not to be hers, stated that these necessaries of Christmas life
+would be produced, and Stephen did not say that the very thought
+of a mince-tart made him ill. Even the English weather, which, it
+is notorious, has of late shown a sad disposition to imitate, and
+even to surpass, in mildness the weather of the Riviera at
+Christmas, decided to oblige Mr Bittenger. At nightfall on
+Christmas Eve it began to snow gently, but steadily--fine, frozen
+snow. And the waits, consisting of boys and girls from the
+Countess of Chell's celebrated institute close by, came and sang
+in the garden in the falling snow, by the light of a lantern. And
+Mr Bittenger's heart was as full as it could hold of English
+Christmas.
+
+As for Vera's heart, it was full of she knew not what. Mr
+Bittenger's attitude towards her grew more and more chivalrous. He
+contrived to indicate that he regarded all the years he had spent
+before making the acquaintance of Vera as so many years absolutely
+wasted. And Stephen did not seem to care.
+
+They retired to rest that evening up a staircase whose banisters
+the industrious hands of Mr Bittenger had entwined with holly and
+paper festoons, and bade each other a merry Christmas with immense
+fervour; but in the conjugal chamber Stephen maintained his policy
+of implacable silence. And, naturally, Vera maintained hers. Could
+it be expected of her that she should yield? The fault was all
+Stephen's. He ought to have taken her to The Bear, Switzerland.
+Then there would have been no dream, no Mr Bittenger, and no
+danger. But as things were, within twenty-four hours he would be a
+dead man.
+
+And throughout Christmas Day Vera, beneath the gaiety with which
+she met the vivacious sallies of Mr Bittenger, waited in horrible
+suspense for the dream to fulfil itself. Stephen alone observed
+her agitated condition. Stephen said to himself: 'The quarrel is
+getting on her nerves. She'll yield before she's a day older. It
+will do her good. Then I'll make it up to her handsomely. But she
+must yield first.'
+
+He little knew he was standing on the edge of the precipice of
+death.
+
+The Christmas dinner succeeded admirably; and Stephen, in whom
+courage was seldom lacking, ate half a mince-pie. The day was
+almost over. No premature decease had so far occurred. And when
+both the men said that, if Vera permitted, they would come with
+her at once to the drawing-room and smoke there, Vera decided that
+after all dreams were nonsense. She entered the drawing-room
+first, and Mr Bittenger followed her, with Stephen behind; but
+just as Stephen was crossing the mat the gardener, holding a
+parcel in his hands and looking rather strange there in the hall,
+spoke to him. And Stephen stopped and called to Mr Bittenger. And
+the drawing-room door was closed upon Vera.
+
+She waited, solitary, for an incredible space of time, and then,
+having heard unaccustomed and violent sounds in the distance, she
+could contain herself no longer, and she rang the bell.
+
+'Louisa,' she demanded of the parlourmaid, 'where is your master?'
+
+'Oh, ma'am,' replied Louisa, giggling--a little licence was surely
+permissible to the girl on Christmas night--'Oh, ma'am, there's
+such a to-do! Tinsley has just brought some boxing-gloves, and
+master and Mr Bittenger have got their coats off in the dining-
+room. And they've had the table pushed up by the door, and you
+never saw such a set-out in all your life ma'am.'
+
+Vera dismissed Louisa.
+
+There it was--the dream! They were going to box. Mr Bittenger was
+doubtless an expert, and she knew that Stephen was not. A chance
+blow by Mr Bittenger in some vital part, and Stephen would be
+lying stretched in eternal stillness in the middle of the dining-
+room floor where the table ought to be! The life of the monster
+was at stake! The life of the brute was in her hands! The dream
+was fulfilling itself to the point of tragedy!
+
+She jumped up and rushed to the dining-room door. It would not
+open. Again, the dream!
+
+'You can't come in,' cried Stephen, laughing. 'Wait a bit.'
+
+She pushed against the door, working the handle.
+
+She was about to insist upon the door being opened, when the idea
+of the danger of such a proceeding occurred to her. In the dream,
+when she got the door opened, her husband's death had already
+happened!
+
+Frantically she ran to the kitchen.
+
+'Louisa,' she ordered. 'Go into the garden and tap at the dining-
+room window, and tell your master that I must speak to him at once
+in the drawing-room.'
+
+And in a pitiable state of excitation, she returned to the
+drawing-room.
+
+After another interminable period of suspense, her ear caught the
+sound of the opening of doors, and then Stephen came into the
+drawing-room. A singular apparition! He was coatless, as Louisa
+had said, and the extremities of his long arms were bulged out
+with cream-coloured boxing-gloves.
+
+She sprang at him and kissed him.
+
+'Steve,' she said, 'are we friends?'
+
+'I should think we were!' he replied, returning her kiss heartily.
+He had won.
+
+'What are you doing?' she asked him.
+
+'Bittenger and I are just going to have a real round with the
+gloves. It's part of his cure for my indigestion, you know. He
+says there's nothing like it. I've only just been able to get
+gloves. Tinsley brought them up just now. And so we sort of
+thought we'd like to have a go at once.'
+
+'Why wouldn't you let me into the dining-room?'
+
+'My child, the table was up against the door. And I fancied,
+perhaps, you wouldn't be exactly charmed, so I--'
+
+'Stephen,' she said, in her most persuasive voice, 'will you do
+something to please me?'
+
+'What is it?'
+
+'Will you?'
+
+A pause.
+
+'Yes, certainly.'
+
+'Don't box tonight.'
+
+'Oh--well! What will Bittenger think?'
+
+Another pause.
+
+'Never mind! You don't want me to box, really?'
+
+'I don't want you to box--not tonight.' 'Agreed, my chuck!' And he
+kissed her again. He could well afford to be magnanimous.
+
+Mr Bittenger ploughed the seas alone to New York.
+
+But supposing that Vera had not interfered, what would have
+happened? That is the unanswerable query which torments the
+superstitious little brain of Vera.
+
+
+
+
+THE BURGLARY
+
+I
+
+
+Lady Dain said: 'Jee, if that portrait stays there much longer,
+you'll just have to take me off to Pirehill one of these fine
+mornings.'
+
+Pirehill is the seat of the great local hospital; but it is also
+the seat of the great local lunatic asylum; and when the
+inhabitants of the Five Towns say merely 'Pirehill', they mean the
+asylum.
+
+'I do declare I can't fancy my food now-a-days,' said Lady Dain,
+'and it's all that portrait!' She stared plaintively up at the
+immense oil-painting which faced her as she sat at the breakfast-
+table in her spacious and opulent dining-room.
+
+Sir Jehoshaphat made no remark.
+
+Despite Lady Dain's animadversions upon it, despite the undoubted
+fact that it was generally disliked in the Five Towns, the
+portrait had cost a thousand pounds (some said guineas), and
+though not yet two years old it was probably worth at least
+fifteen hundred in the picture market. For it was a Cressage; and
+not only was it a Cressage--it was one of the finest Cressages in
+existence.
+
+It marked the summit of Sir Jehoshaphat's career. Sir
+Jehoshaphat's career was, perhaps, the most successful and
+brilliant in the entire social history of the Five Towns. This
+famous man was the principal partner in Dain Brothers. His brother
+was dead, but two of Sir Jee's sons were in the firm. Dain
+Brothers were the largest manufacturers of cheap earthenware in
+the district, catering chiefly for the American and Colonial
+buyer. They had an extremely bad reputation for cutting prices.
+They were hated by every other firm in the Five Towns, and, to
+hear rival manufacturers talk, one would gather the impression
+that Sir Jee had acquired a tremendous fortune by systematically
+selling goods under cost. They were also hated by between eighteen
+and nineteen hundred employees. But such hatred, however virulent,
+had not marred the progress of Sir Jee's career.
+
+He had meant to make a name and he had made it. The Five Towns
+might laugh at his vulgar snobbishness. The Five Towns might sneer
+at his calculated philanthropy. But he was, nevertheless, the
+best-known man in the Five Towns, and it was precisely his
+snobbishness and his philanthropy which had carried him to the
+top. Moreover, he had been the first public man in the Five Towns
+to gain a knighthood. The Five Towns could not deny that it was
+very proud indeed of this knighthood. The means by which he had
+won this distinction were neither here nor there--he had won it.
+And was he not the father of his native borough? Had he not been
+three times mayor of his native borough? Was not the whole
+northern half of the county dotted and spangled by his
+benefactions, his institutions, his endowments?
+
+And it could not be denied that he sometimes tickled the Five
+Towns as the Five Towns likes being tickled. There was, for
+example, the notorious Sneyd incident. Sneyd Hall, belonging to
+the Earl of Chell, lies a few miles south of the Five Towns, and
+from it the pretty Countess of Chell exercises that condescending
+meddlesomeness which so frequently exasperates the Five Towns. Sir
+Jee had got his title by the aid of the Countess-'Interfering
+Iris', as she is locally dubbed. Shortly afterwards he had
+contrived to quarrel with the Countess; and the quarrel was
+conducted by Sir Jee as a quarrel between equals, which delighted
+the district. Sir Jee's final word in it had been to buy a sizable
+tract of land near Sneyd village, just off the Sneyd estate, and
+to erect thereon a mansion quite as imposing as Sneyd Hall, and
+far more up to date, and to call the mansion Sneyd Castle. A
+mighty stroke! Iris was furious; the Earl speechless with fury.
+But they could do nothing. Naturally the Five Towns was tickled.
+
+It was apropos of the house-warming of Sneyd Castle, also of the
+completion of his third mayoralty, and of the inauguration of the
+Dain Technical Institute, that the movement had been started
+(primarily by a few toadies) for tendering to Sir Jee a popular
+gift worthy to express the profound esteem in which he was
+officially held in the Five Towns. It having been generally felt
+that the gift should take the form of a portrait, a local
+dilettante had suggested Cressage, and when the Five Towns had
+inquired into Cressage and discovered that that genius from the
+United States was celebrated throughout the civilized world, and
+regarded as the equal of Velazquez (whoever Velazquez might be),
+and that he had painted half the aristocracy, and that his income
+was regal, the suggestion was accepted and Cressage was
+approached.
+
+Cressage haughtily consented to paint Sir Jee's portrait on his
+usual conditions; namely, that the sitter should go to the little
+village in Bedfordshire where Cressage had his principal studio,
+and that the painting should be exhibited at the Royal Academy
+before being shown anywhere else. (Cressage was an R.A., but no
+one thought of putting R.A. after his name. He was so big, that
+instead of the Royal Academy conferring distinction on him, he
+conferred distinction on the Royal Academy.)
+
+Sir Jee went to Bedfordshire and was rapidly painted, and he came
+back gloomy. The presentation committee went to Bedfordshire later
+to inspect the portrait, and they, too, came back gloomy.
+
+Then the Academy Exhibition opened, and the portrait, showing Sir
+Jee in his robe and chain and in a chair, was instantly hailed as
+possibly the most glorious masterpiece of modern times. All the
+critics were of one accord. The committee and Sir Jee were
+reassured, but only partially, and Sir Jee rather less so than the
+committee. For there was something in the enthusiastic criticism
+which gravely disturbed him. An enlightened generation, thoroughly
+familiar with the dazzling yearly succession of Cressage's
+portraits, need not be told what this something was. One critic
+wrote that Cressage displayed even more than his 'customary
+astounding insight into character....' Another critic wrote that
+Cressage's observation was, as usual, 'calmly and coldly hostile'.
+Another referred to the 'typical provincial mayor, immortalized
+for the diversion of future ages.'
+
+Inhabitants of the Five Towns went to London to see the work for
+which they had subscribed, and they saw a mean, little, old man,
+with thin lips and a straggling grey beard, and shifty eyes, and
+pushful snob written all over him; ridiculous in his gewgaws of
+office. When you looked at the picture close to, it was a
+meaningless mass of coloured smudges, but when you stood fifteen
+feet away from it the portrait was absolutely lifelike, amazing,
+miraculous. It was so wondrously lifelike that some of the
+inhabitants of the Five Towns burst out laughing. Many people felt
+sorry--not for Sir Jee--but for Lady Dain. Lady Dain was beloved
+and genuinely respected. She was a simple, homely, sincere woman,
+her one weakness being that she had never been able to see through
+Sir Jee.
+
+Of course, at the presentation ceremony the portrait had been
+ecstatically referred to as a possession precious for ever, and
+the recipient and his wife pretended to be overflowing with pure
+joy in the ownership of it.
+
+It had been hanging in the dining-room of Sneyd Castle about
+sixteen months, when Lady Dain told her husband that it would
+ultimately drive her into the lunatic asylum.
+
+'Don't be silly, wife,' said Sir Jee. 'I wouldn't part with that
+portrait for ten times what it cost.'
+
+This was, to speak bluntly, a downright lie. Sir Jee secretly
+hated the portrait more than anyone hated it. He would have been
+almost ready to burn down Sneyd Castle in order to get rid of the
+thing. But it happened that on the previous evening, in the
+conversation with the magistrates' clerk, his receptive brain had
+been visited by a less expensive scheme than burning down the
+castle.
+
+Lady Dain sighed.
+
+'Are you going to town early?' she inquired.
+
+'Yes,' he replied. 'I'm on the rota today.'
+
+He was chairman of the borough Bench of magistrates. As he drove
+into town he revolved his scheme and thought it wild and
+dangerous, but still feasible.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+On the Bench that morning Sir Jee shocked Mr Sherratt, the
+magistrates' clerk, and he utterly disgusted Mr Bourne,
+superintendent of the borough police. (I do not intend to name the
+name of the borough--whether Bursley, Hanbridge, Knype, Longshaw,
+or Turnhill. The inhabitants of the Five Towns will know without
+being told; the rest of the world has no right to know.) There had
+recently occurred a somewhat thrilling series of burglaries in the
+district, and the burglars (a gang of them was presumed) had
+escaped the solicitous attentions of the police. But on the
+previous afternoon an underling of Mr Bourne's had caught a man
+who was generally believed to be wholly or partly responsible for
+the burglaries. The Five Towns breathed with relief and
+congratulated Mr Bourne; and Mr Bourne was well pleased with
+himself. The Staffordshire Signal headed the item of news, 'Smart
+Capture of a Supposed Burglar'. The supposed burglar gave his name
+as William Smith, and otherwise behaved in an extremely suspicious
+manner.
+
+Now, Sir Jee, sitting as chief magistrate in the police-court,
+actually dismissed the charge against the man! Overruling his sole
+colleague on the Bench that morning, Alderman Easton, he dismissed
+the charge against William Smith, holding that the evidence for
+the prosecution was insufficient to justify even a remand. No
+wonder that Mr Bourne was discouraged, not to say angry. No wonder
+that that pillar of the law, Mr Sherratt, was pained and shocked.
+At the conclusion of the case Sir Jehoshaphat said that he would
+be glad to speak with William Smith afterwards in the magistrates'
+room, indicating that he sympathized with William Smith, and
+wished to exercise upon William Smith his renowned philanthropy.
+
+And so, at about noon, when the Court majestically rose, Sir Jee
+retired to the magistrates' room, where the humble Alderman Easton
+was discreet enough not to follow him, and awaited William Smith.
+And William Smith came, guided thither by a policeman, to whom, in
+parting from him, he made a rude, surreptitious gesture.
+
+Sir Jee, seated in the arm-chair which dominates the other chairs
+round the elm table in the magistrates' room, emitted a
+preliminary cough.
+
+'Smith,' he said sternly, leaning his elbows on the table, 'you
+were very fortunate this morning, you know.'
+
+And he gazed at Smith.
+
+Smith stood near the door, cap in hand. He did not resemble a
+burglar, who surely ought to be big, muscular, and masterful. He
+resembled an undersized clerk who has been out of work for a long
+time, but who has nevertheless found the means to eat and drink
+rather plenteously. He was clothed in a very shabby navy-blue
+suit, frayed at the wrists and ankles, and greasy in front. His
+linen collar was brown with dirt, his fingers were dirty, his hair
+was unkempt and long, and a young and lusty black beard was
+sprouting on his chin. His boots were not at all pleasant.
+
+'Yes, governor,' Smith replied, lightly, with a Manchester accent.
+'And what's YOUR game?'
+
+Sir Jee was taken aback. He, the chairman of the borough Bench,
+and the leading philanthropist in the country, to be so spoken to!
+But what could he do? He himself had legally established Smith's
+innocence. Smith was as free as air, and had a perfect right to
+adopt any tone he chose to any man he chose. And Sir Jee desired a
+service from William Smith.
+
+'I was hoping I might be of use to you,' said Sir Jehoshaphat
+diplomatically.
+
+'Well,' said Smith, 'that's all right, that is. But none of your
+philanthropic dodges, you know. I don't want to lead a new life,
+and I don't want to turn over a new leaf, and I don't want a
+helpin' hand, nor none o' those things. And, what's more, I don't
+want a situation. I've got all the situation as I need. But I
+never refuse money, nor beer neither. Never did, and I'm forty
+years old next month.'
+
+'I suppose burgling doesn't pay very well, does it?' Sir Jee
+boldly ventured.
+
+William Smith laughed coarsely.
+
+'It pays right enough,' said he. 'But I don't put my money on my
+back, governor, I put it into a bit of public-house property when
+I get the chance.'
+
+'It may pay,' said Sir Jee. 'But it is wrong. It is very anti-social.'
+
+'Is it, indeed?' Smith returned dryly. 'Anti-social, is it? Well,
+I've heard it called plenty o' things in my time, but never that.
+Now, I should have called it quite sociablelike, sort of making
+free with strangers, and so on. However,' he added, 'I come across
+a cove once as told me crime was nothing but a disease and ought
+to be treated as such. I asked him for a dozen o' port, but he
+never sent it.'
+
+'Ever been caught before?' Sir Jee inquired.
+
+'Not much!' Smith exclaimed. 'And this'll be a lesson to me, I can
+tell you. Now, what are you getting at, governor? Because my
+time's money, my time is.'
+
+Sir Jee coughed once more.
+
+'Sit down,' said Sir Jee.
+
+And William Smith sat down opposite to him at the table, and put
+his shiny elbows on the table precisely in the manner of Sir Jee's
+elbows.
+
+'Well?' he cheerfully encouraged Sir Jee.
+
+'How would you like to commit a burglary that was not a crime?'
+said Sir Jee, his shifty eyes wandering around the room. 'A
+perfectly lawful burglary?'
+
+'What ARE you getting at?' William Smith was genuinely astonished.
+
+'At my residence, Sneyd Castle,' Sir Jee proceeded, 'there's a
+large portrait of myself in the dining-room that I want to have
+stolen. You understand?'
+
+'Stolen?'
+
+'Yes. I want to get rid of it. And I want--er--people to think
+that it has been stolen.'
+
+'Well, why don't you stop up one night and steal it yourself, and
+then burn it?' William Smith suggested.
+
+'That would be deceitful,' said Sir Jee, gravely. 'I could not
+tell my friends that the portrait had been stolen if it had not
+been stolen. The burglary must be entirely genuine.'
+
+'What's the figure?' said Smith curtly.
+
+'Figure?'
+
+'What are you going to give me for the job?'
+
+'GIVE you for doing the job?' Sir Jee repeated, his secret and
+ineradicable meanness aroused. 'GIVE you? Why, I'm giving you the
+opportunity to honestly steal a picture that's worth over a
+thousand pounds--I dare say it would be worth two thousand pounds
+in America--and you want to be paid into the bargain! Do you know,
+my man, that people come all the way from Manchester, and even
+London, to see that portrait?' He told Smith about the painting.
+
+'Then why are you in such a stew to be rid of it?' queried the
+burglar.
+
+'That's my affair,' said Sir Jee. 'I don't like it. Lady Dain
+doesn't like it. But it's a presentation portrait, and so I can't--
+you see, Mr Smith?'
+
+'And how am I going to dispose of it when I've got it?' Smith
+demanded. 'You can't melt a portrait down as if it was silver. By
+what you say, governor, it's known all over the blessed world.
+Seems to me I might just as well try to sell the Nelson Column.'
+
+'Oh, nonsense!' said Sir Jee. 'Nonsense. You'll sell it in America
+quite easily. It'll be a fortune to you. Keep it for a year first,
+and then send it to New York.'
+
+William Smith shook his head and drummed his fingers on the table;
+and then quite suddenly he brightened and said--
+
+'All right, governor. I'll take it on, just to oblige you.'
+
+'When can you do it?' asked Sir Jee, hardly concealing his joy.
+'Tonight?'
+
+'No,' said Smith, mysteriously. 'I'm engaged tonight.'
+
+'Well, tomorrow night?'
+
+'Nor tomorrow. I'm engaged tomorrow too.'
+
+'You seem to be very much engaged, my man,' Sir Jee observed.
+
+'What do you expect?' Smith retorted. 'Business is business. I
+could do it the night after tomorrow.'
+
+'But that's Christmas Eve,' Sir Jee protested.
+
+'What if it is Christmas Eve?' said Smith coldly. 'Would you
+prefer Christmas Day? I'm engaged on Boxing Day AND the day
+after.'
+
+'Not in the Five Towns, I trust?' Sir Jee remarked.
+
+'No,' said Smith shortly. 'The Five Towns is about sucked dry.'
+
+The affair was arranged for Christmas Eve.
+
+'Now,' Sir Jee suggested, 'shall I draw you a plan of the castle,
+so that you can--'
+
+William Smith's face expressed terrific scorn. 'Do you suppose,'
+he said, 'as I haven't had plans o' your castle ever since it was
+built? What do you take me for? I'm not a blooming excursionist,
+I'm not. I'm a business man--that's what I am.'
+
+Sir Jee was snubbed, and he agreed submissively to all William
+Smith's arrangements for the innocent burglary. He perceived that
+in William Smith he had stumbled on a professional of the highest
+class, and this good fortune pleased him.
+
+'There's only one thing that riles me,' said Smith, in parting,
+'and that is that you'll go and say that after you'd done
+everything you could for me I went and burgled your castle. And
+you'll talk about the ingratitude of the lower classes. I know
+you, governor!'
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+On the afternoon of the 24th of December Sir Jehoshaphat drove
+home to Sneyd Castle from the principal of the three Dain
+manufactories, and found Lady Dain superintending the work of
+packing up trunks. He and she were to quit the castle that
+afternoon in order to spend Christmas on the other side of the
+Five Towns, under the roof of their eldest son, John, who had a
+new house, a new wife, and a new baby (male). John was a
+domineering person, and, being rather proud of his house and all
+that was his, he had obstinately decided to have his own Christmas
+at his own hearth. Grandpapa and Grandmamma, drawn by the
+irresistible attraction of that novelty, a grandson (though Mrs
+John HAD declined to have the little thing named Jehoshaphat), had
+yielded to John's solicitations, and the family gathering, for the
+first time in history, was not to occur round Sir Jee's mahogany.
+
+Sir Jee, very characteristically, said nothing to Lady Dain
+immediately. He allowed her to proceed with the packing of the
+trunks, and then tea was served, and as the time was approaching
+for the carriage to come round to take them to the station, at
+last he suddenly remarked-
+
+'I shan't be able to go with you to John's this afternoon.'
+
+'Oh, Jee!' she exclaimed. 'Really, you are tiresome. Why couldn't
+you tell me before?'
+
+'I will come over tomorrow morning--perhaps in time for church,'
+he proceeded, ignoring her demand for an explanation.
+
+He always did ignore her demand for an explanation. Indeed, she
+only asked for explanations in a mechanical and perfunctory
+manner--she had long since ceased to expect them. Sir Jee had been
+born like that--devious, mysterious, incalculable. And Lady Dain
+accepted him as he was. She was somewhat surprised, therefore,
+when he went on--
+
+'I have some minutes of committee meetings that I really must go
+carefully through and send off tonight, and you know as well as I
+do that there'll be no chance of doing that at John's. I've
+telegraphed to John.'
+
+He was obviously nervous and self-conscious.
+
+'There's no food in the house,' sighed Lady Dain. 'And the
+servants are all going away except Callear, and HE can't cook your
+dinner tonight. I think I'd better stay myself and look after
+you.'
+
+'You'll do no such thing,' said Sir Jee, decisively. 'As for my
+dinner, anything will do for that. The servants have been promised
+their holiday, to start from this evening, and they must have it.
+I can manage.'
+
+Here spoke the philanthropist with his unshakable sense of
+justice.
+
+So Lady Dain departed, anxious and worried, having previously
+arranged something cold for Sir Jee in the dining-room, and
+instructed Callear about boiling the water for Sir Jee's tea on
+Christmas morning. Callear was the under-coachman and a useful odd
+man. He it was who would drive Sir Jee to the station on Christmas
+morning, and then guard the castle and the stables thereof during
+the absence of the family and the other servants. Callear slept
+over the stables.
+
+And after Sir Jee had consumed his cold repast in the dining-room
+the other servants went, and Sir Jee was alone in the castle,
+facing the portrait.
+
+He had managed the affair fairly well, he thought. Indeed, he had
+a talent for chicane, and none knew it better than himself. It
+would have been dangerous if the servants had been left in the
+castle. They might have suffered from insomnia, and heard William
+Smith, and interfered with the operations of William Smith. On the
+other hand, Sir Jee had no intention whatever of leaving the
+castle uninhabited to the mercies of William Smith. He felt that
+he himself must be on the spot to see that everything went right
+and that nothing went wrong. Thus, the previously-arranged scheme
+for the servants' holiday fitted perfectly into his plans, and all
+that he had had to do was to refuse to leave the castle till the
+morrow. It was ideal.
+
+Nevertheless, he was a little afraid of what he had done, and of
+what he was going to permit William Smith to do. It was certainly
+dangerous--certainly rather a wild scheme. However, the die was
+cast. And within twelve hours he would be relieved of the
+intolerable incubus of the portrait.
+
+And when he thought of the humiliations which that portrait had
+caused him; when he remembered the remarks of his sons concerning
+it, especially John's remarks; when he recalled phrases about it
+in London newspapers, he squirmed, and told himself that no scheme
+for getting rid of it could be too wild and perilous. And, after
+all, the burglary dodge was the only dodge, absolutely the only
+conceivable practical method of disposing of the portrait--except
+burning down the castle. And surely it was preferable to a
+conflagration, to arson! Moreover, in case of fire at the castle
+some blundering fool would be sure to cry; 'The portrait! The
+portrait must be saved!' And the portrait would be saved.
+
+He gazed at the repulsive, hateful thing. In the centre of the
+lower part of the massive gold frame was the legend: 'Presented to
+Sir Jehoshaphat Dain, Knight, as a mark of public esteem and
+gratitude,' etc. He wondered if William Smith would steal the
+frame. It was to be hoped that he would not steal the frame. In
+fact, William Smith would find it very difficult to steal that
+frame unless he had an accomplice or so.
+
+'This is the last time I shall see YOU!' said Sir Jee to the
+portrait.
+
+Then he unfastened the catch of one of the windows in the dining-
+room (as per contract with William Smith), turned out the electric
+light, and went to bed in the deserted castle.
+
+He went to bed, but not to sleep. It was no part of Sir Jee's
+programme to sleep. He intended to listen, and he did listen.
+
+And about two o'clock, precisely the hour which William Smith had
+indicated, he fancied he heard muffled and discreet noises. Then
+he was sure that he heard them. William Smith had kept his word.
+Then the noises ceased for a period, and then they recommenced.
+Sir Jee restrained his curiosity as long as he could, and when he
+could restrain it no more he rose and silently opened his bedroom
+window and put his head out into the nipping night air of
+Christmas. And by good fortune he saw the vast oblong of the
+picture, carefully enveloped in sheets, being passed by a couple
+of dark figures through the dining-room window to the garden
+outside. William Smith had a colleague, then, and he was taking
+the frame as well as the canvas. Sir Jee watched the men disappear
+down the avenue, and they did not reappear. Sir Jee returned to
+bed.
+
+Yes, he felt himself equal to facing it out with his family and
+friends. He felt himself equal to pretending that he had no
+knowledge of the burglary.
+
+Having slept a few hours, he got up early and, half-dressed,
+descended to the dining-room just to see what sort of a mess
+William Smith had made.
+
+The canvas of the portrait lay flat on the hearthrug, with the
+following words written on it in chalk: 'This is no use to me.' It
+was the massive gold frame that had gone.
+
+Further, as was later discovered, all the silver had gone. Not a
+spoon was left in the castle.
+
+
+
+
+NEWS OF THE ENGAGEMENT
+
+
+My mother never came to meet me at Bursley station when I arrived
+in the Five Towns from London; much less did she come as far as
+Knype station, which is the great traffic centre of the district,
+the point at which one changes from the express into the local
+train. She had always other things to do; she was 'preparing' for
+me. So I had the little journey from Knype to Bursley, and then
+the walk up Trafalgar Road, amid the familiar high chimneys and
+the smoke and the clayey mud and the football posts and the
+Midland accent, all by myself. And there was leisure to consider
+anew how I should break to my mother the tremendous news I had for
+her. I had been considering that question ever since getting into
+the train at Euston, where I had said goodbye to Agnes; but in the
+atmosphere of the Five Towns it seemed just slightly more
+difficult; though, of course, it wasn't difficult, really.
+
+You see, I wrote to my mother regularly every week, telling her
+most of my doings. She knew all my friends by name. I dare say she
+formed in her mind notions of what sort of people they were. Thus
+I had frequently mentioned Agnes and her family in my letters. But
+you can't write even to your mother and say in cold blood: 'I
+think I am beginning to fall in love with Agnes,' 'I think Agnes
+likes me,' 'I am mad on her,' 'I feel certain she likes me,' 'I
+shall propose to her on such a day.' You can't do that. At least I
+couldn't. Hence it had come about that on the 20th of December I
+had proposed to Agnes and been accepted by Agnes, and my mother
+had no suspicion that my happiness was so near. And on the 22nd,
+by a previous and unalterable arrangement, I had come to spend
+Christmas with my mother.
+
+I was the only son of a widow; I was all that my mother had. And
+lo! I had gone and engaged myself to a girl she had never seen,
+and I had kept her in the dark! She would certainly be extremely
+surprised, and she might be a little bit hurt--just at first.
+Anyhow, the situation was the least in the world delicate.
+
+I walked up the whitened front steps of my mother's little house,
+just opposite where the electric cars stop, but before I could put
+my hand on the bell my little plump mother, in her black silk and
+her gold brooch and her auburn hair, opened to me, having
+doubtless watched me down the road from the bay-window, as usual,
+and she said, as usual kissing me--
+
+'Well, Philip! How are you?'
+
+And I said--
+
+'Oh! I'm all right, mother. How are you?'
+
+I perceived instantly that she was more excited than my arrival
+ordinarily made her. There were tears in her smiling eyes, and she
+was as nervous as a young girl. She did indeed look remarkably
+young for a woman of forty-five, with twenty-five years of
+widowhood and a brief but too tempestuous married life behind her.
+
+The thought flashed across my mind: 'By some means or other she
+has got wind of my engagement. But how?'
+
+But I said nothing. I, too, was naturally rather nervous. Mothers
+are kittle cattle.
+
+'I'll tell her at supper,' I decided.
+
+And she hovered round me, like a sea-gull round a steamer, as I
+went upstairs.
+
+There was a ring at the door. She flew, instead of letting the
+servant go. It was a porter with my bag.
+
+Just as I was coming down-stairs again there was another ring at
+the door. And my mother appeared magically out of the kitchen, but
+I was beforehand with her, and with a laugh I insisted on opening
+the front door myself this time. A young woman stood on the step.
+
+'Please, Mrs Dawson wants to know if Mrs Durance can kindly lend
+her half-a-dozen knives and forks?'
+
+'Eh, with pleasure,' said my mother, behind me. 'Just wait a
+minute, Lucy. Come inside on the mat.'
+
+I followed my mother into the drawing-room, where she kept her
+silver in a cabinet.
+
+'That's Mrs Dawson's new servant,' my mother whispered. 'But she
+needn't think I'm going to lend her my best, because I'm not.'
+
+'I shouldn't, if I were you,' I supported her.
+
+And she went out with some second-best in tissue paper, and beamed
+on Mrs Dawson's servant with an assumed benevolence.
+
+'There!' she exclaimed. 'And the compliments of the season to your
+mistress, Lucy.'
+
+After that my mother disappeared into the kitchen to worry an
+entirely capable servant. And I roamed about, feeling happily
+excited, examining the drawing-room, in which nothing was changed
+except the incandescent light and the picture postcards on the
+mantelpiece. Then I wandered into the dining-room, a small room at
+the back of the house, and here an immense surprise awaited me.
+
+Supper was set for three!
+
+'Well,' I reflected. 'Here's a nice state of affairs! Supper for
+three, and she hasn't breathed a word!'
+
+My mother was so clever in social matters, and especially in the
+planning of delicious surprises, that I believed her capable even
+of miracles. In some way or other she must have discovered the
+state of my desires towards Agnes. She had written, or something.
+She and Agnes had been plotting together by letter to startle me,
+and perhaps telegraphing. Agnes had fibbed in telling me that she
+could not possibly come to Bursley for Christmas; she had
+delightfully fibbed. And my mother had got her concealed somewhere
+in the house, or was momentarily expecting her. That explained the
+tears, the nervousness, the rushes to the door.
+
+I crept out of the dining-room, determined not to let my mother
+know that I had secretly viewed the supper-table. And as I was
+crossing the lobby to the drawing-room there was a third ring at
+the door, and a third time my mother rushed out of the kitchen.
+
+'By Jove!' I thought. 'Suppose it's Agnes. What a scene!'
+
+And trembling with expectation I opened the door. It was Mr Nixon.
+
+Now, Mr Nixon was an old friend of the family's, a man of forty-
+nine or fifty, with a reputation for shrewdness and increasing
+wealth. He owned a hundred and seventy-five cottages in the town,
+having bought them gradually in half-dozens, and in rows; he
+collected the rents himself, and attended to the repairs himself,
+and was celebrated as a good landlord, and as being almost the
+only man in Bursley who had made cottage property pay. He lived
+alone in Commerce Street, and, though not talkative, was usually
+jolly, with one or two good stories tucked away in the corners of
+his memory. He was my mother's trustee, and had morally aided her
+in the troublous times before my father's early death.
+
+'Well, young man,' cried he. 'So you're back in owd Bosley!' It
+amused him to speak the dialect a little occasionally.
+
+And he brought his burly, powerful form into the lobby.
+
+I greeted him as jovially as I could, and then he shook hands with
+my mother, neither of them speaking.
+
+'Mr Nixon is come for supper, Philip,' said my mother.
+
+I liked Mr Nixon, but I was not too well pleased by this
+information, for I wanted to talk confidentially to my mother. I
+had a task before me with my mother, and here Mr Nixon was
+plunging into the supper. I could not break it gently to my mother
+that I was engaged to a strange young woman in the presence of Mr
+Nixon. Mr Nixon had been in to supper several times during
+previous visits of mine, but never on the first night.
+
+However, I had to make the best of it. And we sat down and began
+on the ham, the sausages, the eggs, the crumpets, the toast, the
+jams, the mince-tarts, the Stilton, and the celery. But we none of
+us ate very much, despite my little plump mother's protestations.
+
+My suspicion was that perhaps something had gone slightly wrong
+with my mother's affairs, and that Mr Nixon was taking the first
+opportunity to explain things to me. But such a possibility did
+not interest me, for I could easily afford to keep my mother and a
+wife too. I was still preoccupied in my engagement--and surely
+there is nothing astonishing in that--and I began to compose the
+words in which, immediately on the departure of Mr Nixon after
+supper, I would tackle my mother on the subject.
+
+When we had reached the Stilton and celery, I intimated that I
+must walk down to the post-office, as I had to dispatch a letter.
+
+'Won't it do tomorrow, my pet?' asked my mother.
+
+'It will not,' I said.
+
+Imagine leaving Agnes two days without news of my safe arrival and
+without assurances of my love! I had started writing the letter in
+the train, near Willesden, and I finished it in the drawing-room.
+
+'A lady in the case?' Mr Nixon called out gaily.
+
+'Yes,' I replied with firmness.
+
+I went forth, bought a picture postcard showing St Luke's Square,
+Bursley, most untruthfully picturesque, and posted the card and
+the letter to my darling Agnes. I hoped that Mr Nixon would have
+departed ere my return; he had made no reference at all during
+supper to my mother's affairs. But he had not departed. I found
+him solitary in the drawing-room, smoking a very fine cigar.
+
+'Where's the mater?' I demanded.
+
+'She's just gone out of the room,' he said. 'Come and sit down.
+Have a weed. I want a bit of a chat with you, Philip.'
+
+I obeyed, taking one of the very fine cigars.
+
+'Well, Uncle Nixon,' I encouraged him, wishing to get the chat
+over because my mind was full of Agnes. I sometimes called him
+uncle for fun.
+
+'Well, my boy,' he began. 'It's no use me beating about the bush.
+What do you think of me as a stepfather?'
+
+I was struck, as they say down there, all of a heap.
+
+'What?' I stammered. 'You don't mean to say--you and mother--?'
+
+He nodded.
+
+'Yes, I do, lad. Yesterday she promised as she'd marry my unworthy
+self. It's been coming along for some time. But I don't expect
+she's given you any hint in her letters. In fact, I know she
+hasn't. It would have been rather difficult, wouldn't it? She
+couldn't well have written, "My dear Philip, an old friend, Mr
+Nixon, is falling in love with me and I believe I'm falling in
+love with him. One of these days he'll be proposing to me." She
+couldn't have written like that, could she?'
+
+I laughed. I could not help it.
+
+'Shake hands,' I said warmly. 'I'm delighted.'
+
+And soon afterwards my mother sidled in, shyly.
+
+'The lad's delighted, Sarah,' said Mr Nixon shortly.
+
+I said nothing about my own engagement that night. I had never
+thought of my mother as a woman with a future, I had never
+realized that she was desirable, and that a man might desire her,
+and that her lonely existence in that house was not all that she
+had the right to demand from life. And I was ashamed of my
+characteristic filial selfish egoism. So I decided that I would
+not intrude my joys on hers until the next morning. We live and
+learn.
+
+
+
+
+BEGINNING THE NEW YEAR
+
+I
+
+
+We are a stolid and a taciturn race, we of the Five Towns. It may
+be because we are geographically so self contained; or it may be
+because we work in clay and iron; or it may merely be because it
+is our nature to be stolid and taciturn. But stolid and taciturn
+we are; and some of the instances of our stolidity and our
+taciturnity are enough to astound. They do not, of course, astound
+us natives; we laugh at them, we think they are an immense joke,
+and what the outer world may think does not trouble our deep
+conceit of ourselves. I have often wondered what would be the
+effect, other than an effect of astonishment, on the outer world,
+of one of these narratives illustrating our Five Towns
+peculiarities of deportment. And I intend for the first time in
+history to make such a narrative public property. I have purposely
+not chosen an extreme example; just an average example. You will
+see how it strikes you.
+
+Toby Hall, once a burgess of Turnhill, the northernmost and
+smallest of the Five Towns, was passing, last New Year's Eve,
+through the district by train on his way from Crewe to Derby. He
+lived at Derby, and he was returning from the funeral of a brother
+member of the Ancient Order of Foresters at Crewe. He got out of
+the train at Knype, the great railway centre of the Five Towns, to
+have a glass of beer in the second-class refreshment-room. It
+being New Year's Eve, the traffic was heavy and disorganized,
+especially in the refreshment-room, and when Toby Hall emerged on
+to the platform again the train was already on the move. Toby was
+neither young nor active. His years were fifty, and on account of
+the funeral he wore broadcloth and a silk hat, and his overcoat
+was new and encumbering. Impossible to take a flying leap into the
+train! He missed the train. And then he reflectively stroked his
+short grey beard (he had no moustache, and his upper lip was very
+long), and then he smoothed down his new overcoat over his rotund
+form.
+
+'Young man,' he asked a porter. 'When's next train Derby way?'
+
+'Ain't none afore tomorrow.'
+
+Toby went and had another glass of beer.
+
+'D--d if I don't go to Turnhill,' he said to himself, slowly and
+calmly, as he paid for the second glass of beer.
+
+He crossed the station by the subway and waited for the loop-line
+train to Turnhill. He had not set foot in the Five Towns for
+three-and-twenty years, having indeed carefully and continuously
+avoided it, as a man will avoid the street where his creditor
+lives. But he discovered no change in Knype railway-station. And
+he had a sort of pleasure in the fact that he knew his way about
+it, knew where the loop-line trains started from and other
+interesting little details. Even the special form of the loop-line
+time-table, pasted here and there on the walls of the station, had
+not varied since his youth. (We return Radicals to Parliament, but
+we are proud of a railway which for fine old English conservatism
+brooks no rival.)
+
+Toby gazed around, half challengingly and half nervously--it was
+conceivable that he might be recognized, or might recognize. But
+no! Not a soul in the vast, swaying, preoccupied, luggage-laden
+crowds gave him a glance. As for him, although he fully recognized
+nobody, yet nearly every face seemed to be half-familiar. He
+climbed into a second-class compartment when the train drew up,
+and ten other people, all with third-class tickets, followed his
+example; three persons were already seated therein. The
+compartment was illuminated by one lamp, and in the Bleakridge
+Tunnel this lamp expired. Everything reminded him of his youth.
+
+In twenty minutes he was leaving Turnhill station and entering the
+town. It was about nine o'clock, and colder than winters of the
+period usually are. The first thing he saw was an electric tram,
+and the second thing he saw was another electric tram. In Toby's
+time there were no trams at Turnhill, and the then recently-
+introduced steam-trams between Bursley and Longshaw, long since
+superseded, were regarded as the final marvel of science as
+applied to traction. And now there were electric trams at
+Turnhill! The railway renewed his youth, but this darting
+electricity showed him how old he was. The Town Hall, which was
+brand-new when he left Turnhill, had the look of a mediaeval hotel
+de ville as he examined it in the glamour of the corporation's
+incandescent gas. And it was no more the sole impressive pile in
+the borough. The High Street and its precincts abounded in
+impressive piles. He did not know precisely what they were, but
+they had the appearance of being markets, libraries, baths, and
+similar haunts of luxury; one was a bank. He thought that Turnhill
+High Street compared very well with Derby. He would have preferred
+it to be less changed. If the High Street was thus changed,
+everything would be changed, including Child Row. The sole
+phenomenon that recalled his youth (except the Town Hall) was the
+peculiar smell of oranges and apples floating out on the frosty
+air from holly-decorated greengrocers' shops.
+
+He passed through the Market Square, noting that sinister freak,
+the Jubilee Tower, and came to Child Row. The first building on
+your right as you enter Child Row from the square is the Primitive
+Methodist Chapel. Yes, it was still there; Primitive Methodism had
+not failed in Turnhill because Toby Hall had deserted the cause
+three-and-twenty years ago! But something serious had happened to
+the structure. Gradually Toby realized that its old face had been
+taken out and a new one put in, the classic pillars had vanished,
+and a series of Gothic arches had been substituted by way of
+portico; a pretty idea, but not to Toby's liking. It was another
+change, another change! He crossed the street and proceeded
+downwards in the obscurity, and at length halted and peered with
+his little blue eyes at a small house (one of twins) on the other
+side from where he stood. That house, at any rate, was unchanged.
+It was a two-storeyed house, with a semicircular fanlight over a
+warped door of grained panelling. The blind of the window to the
+left of the door was irradiated from within, proving habitation.
+
+'I wonder--' ran Toby's thought. And he unhesitatingly crossed the
+street again, towards it, feeling first for the depth of the
+kerbstone with his umbrella. He had a particular and special
+interest in that house (No. 11 it was--and is), for, four-and-
+twenty years ago he had married it. II
+
+Four-and-twenty years ago Toby Hall (I need not say that his
+proper Christian name was Tobias) had married Miss Priscilla
+Bratt, then a calm and self-reliant young woman of twenty-three,
+and Priscilla had the house, together with a certain income, under
+the will of her father. The marriage was not the result of burning
+passion on either side. It was a union of two respectabilities,
+and it might have succeeded as well as such unions generally do
+succeed, if Priscilla had not too frequently mentioned the fact
+that the house they lived in was hers. He knew that the house was
+hers. The whole world was perfectly aware of the ownership of the
+house, and her references to the matter amounted to a lack of
+tact. Several times Toby had indicated as much. But Priscilla took
+no heed. She had the hide of an alligator herself (though a
+personable girl), and she assumed that her husband's hide was of
+similar stuff. This assumption was justifiable, except that in
+just one spot the skin of Toby was tender. He really did not care
+to be reminded that he was living under his wife's roof. The
+reiteration settled on his nerves like a malady. And before a year
+had elapsed Priscilla had contrived to remind him once too often.
+And one day he put some things in a carpet-bag, and a hat on his
+head, and made for the door. The house was antique, and the front-
+parlour gave directly on to the street.
+
+'Where be going?' Priscilla asked him.
+
+He hesitated a second, and said--
+
+'Merica.'
+
+And he was. In the Five Towns we are apt to end our marriages in
+that laconic manner. Toby did not complain too much; he simply and
+unaffectedly went. It might be imagined that the situation was a
+trying one for Priscilla. Not so! Priscilla had experienced
+marriage with Toby and had found it wanting. She was content to be
+relieved of Toby. She had her house and her money and her self-
+esteem, and also tranquillity. She accepted the solution, and
+devoted her days to the cleanliness of the house.
+
+Toby drew all the money he had out of the Bursley and Turnhill
+Permanent Fifty Pounds Benefit Building Society (four shares,
+nearly paid up) and set sail--in the Adriatic, which was then the
+leading greyhound of the Atlantic--for New York. From New York he
+went to Trenton (New Jersey), which is the Five Towns of America.
+A man of his skill in handling clay on a wheel had no difficulty
+whatever in wresting a good livelihood from Trenton. When he had
+tarried there a year he caused a letter to be written to his wife
+informing her that he was dead. He wished to be quite free; and
+also (we have our feeling for justice) he wished his wife to be
+quite free. It did not occur to him that he had done anything
+extraordinary, either in deserting his wife or in forwarding false
+news of his death. He had done the simple thing, the casual thing,
+the blunt thing, the thing that necessitated the minimum of
+talking. He did not intend to return to England.
+
+However, after a few years, he did return to England. The cause of
+his return is irrelevant to the history, but I may say that it
+sprang from a conflict between the Five Towns temperament and the
+Trenton Union of Earthenware Operatives. Such is the power of
+Unions in the United States that Toby, if he wished to remain
+under the Federal Flag, had either to yield or to starve. He would
+not yield. He changed his name and came to England; strolled
+calmly into the Crown Porcelain Works at Derby one day, and there
+recommenced his career as an artificer of earthenware. He did
+well. He could easily earn four pounds a week, and had no desires,
+save in the direction of fly-fishing--not an expensive diversion.
+He knew better than to marry. He existed quietly; and one year
+trod on the heels of another, and carried him from thirty to forty
+and forty to fifty, and no one found out his identity, though
+there are several direct trains daily between Derby and Knype.
+
+And now, owing to the death of a friend and a glass of beer, he
+was in Child Row, crossing the street towards the house whose
+ownership had caused him to quit it.
+
+He knocked on the door with the handle of his umbrella. There was
+no knocker; there never had been a knocker. III
+
+The door opened cautiously, as such doors in the Five Towns do,
+after a shooting of bolts and a loosing of chains; it opened to
+the extent of about nine inches, and Toby Hall saw the face of a
+middle-aged woman eyeing him.
+
+'Is this Mrs Hall's?' he asked sternly.
+
+'No. It ain't Mrs Hall's. It's Mrs Tansley's.'
+
+'I thowt--'
+
+The door opened a little wider.
+
+'That's not you, Tobias?' said the woman unmoved.
+
+'I reckon it is, though,' replied Toby, with a difficult smile.
+
+'Bless us!' exclaimed the woman. The door oscillated slightly
+under her hand. 'Bless us!' she repeated. And then suddenly,
+'You'd happen better come in, Tobias.'
+
+'Aye!' said Tobias.
+
+And he entered.
+
+'Sit ye down, do,' said his wife. 'I thowt as you were dead. They
+wrote and told me so.'
+
+'Aye!' said Tobias. 'But I am na'.'
+
+He sat down in an arm-chair near the old-fashioned grate, with its
+hobs at either side. He was acquainted with that chair, and it had
+not appreciably altered since his departure. The lastingness of
+furniture under fair treatment is astonishing. This chair was
+uncomfortably in exactly the same spot where it had always been
+uncomfortable; and the same anti-macassar was draped over its
+uncompromising back. Toby put his hat on the table, and leaned his
+umbrella against the chimney-piece. His overcoat he retained. Same
+table; same chimney-piece; same clock and ornaments on the
+chimney-piece! But a different carpet on the floor, and different
+curtains before the window.
+
+Priscilla bolted and chained the door, and then she too sat down.
+Her gown was black, with a small black silk apron. And she was
+stout, and she wore felt slippers and moved with the same gingerly
+care as Toby himself did. She looked fully her years. Her thin
+lips were firmer than ever. It was indeed Priscilla.
+
+'Well, well!' she murmured.
+
+But her capacity for wonder was nearly exhausted.
+
+'Aye!' said Toby, with an air that was meant to be quasi-humorous.
+He warmed his hands at the fire, and then rubbed them over the
+front of his calves, leaning forward.
+
+'So ye've come back?' said Priscilla.
+
+'Aye!' concurred Toby.
+
+There was a pause.
+
+'Cold weather we're having,' he muttered.
+
+'It's seasonable,' Priscilla pointed out.
+
+Her glance rested on a sprig of holly that was tied under the gas-
+chandelier, unique relic of Christmas in the apartment.
+
+Another pause. It would be hazardous to guess what their feelings
+were; perhaps their feelings were scarcely anything at all.
+
+'And what be the news?' Toby inquired, with what passes in the
+Five Towns for geniality.
+
+'News?' she repeated, as if not immediately grasping the
+significance of the question. 'I don't know as there's any news,
+nothing partic'ler, that is.'
+
+Hung on the wall near the chimney-piece was a photograph of a
+girl. It was an excellent likeness to Priscilla, as she was in
+Toby's pre-Trenton days. How young and fresh the creature looked;
+so simple, so inexperienced! It startled Toby.
+
+'I don't remember that,' he said.
+
+'What?'
+
+'That!' And he jerked his elbow towards the photograph.
+
+'Oh! THAT! That's my daughter,' said Priscilla.
+
+'Bless us!' said Toby in turn.
+
+'I married Job Tansley,' Priscilla continued. 'He died four years
+ago last Knype Wakes Monday. HER'S married'--indicating the
+photograph--'her married young Gibson last September.'
+
+'Well, well!' murmured Toby.
+
+Another pause.
+
+There was a shuffling on the pavement outside, and some children
+began to sing about shepherds and flocks.
+
+'Oh, bother them childer,' said Priscilla. 'I must send 'em off.'
+
+She got up.
+
+'Here! Give 'em a penny,' Toby suggested, holding out a penny.
+
+'Yes, and then they'll tell others, and I shan't have a moment's
+peace all night!' Priscilla grumbled.
+
+However, she bestowed the penny, cutting the song off abruptly in
+the middle. And she bolted and chained the door and sat down
+again.
+
+Another pause.
+
+'Well, well!' said Priscilla.
+
+'Aye!' Toby agreed. 'Good coal that!'
+
+'Fourteen shilling a ton!'
+
+Another pause, and a longer.
+
+'Is Ned Walklate still at th' Rose and Crown?' Toby asked.
+
+'For aught I know he is,' said Priscilla.
+
+'I'll just step round there,' said Toby, picking up his hat and
+rising.
+
+As he was manoeuvring the door-chain, Priscilla said--
+
+'You're forgetting your umbrella, Tobias.'
+
+'No,' he answered. 'I hanna' forgotten it. I'm coming back.'
+
+Their eyes met, charged with meaning.
+
+'That'll be all right,' she said. 'Well, well!'
+
+'Aye!'
+
+And he stepped round to Ned Walklate's.
+
+
+
+
+FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER
+
+I
+
+
+It is the greatest mistake in the world to imagine that, because
+the Five Towns is an industrial district, devoted to the
+manufacture of cups and saucers, marbles and door-knobs, therefore
+there is no luxury in it.
+
+A writer, not yet deceased, who spent two nights there, and wrote
+four hundred pages about it, has committed herself to the
+assertion that there are no private carriages in its streets--
+only perambulators and tramcars.
+
+That writer's reputation is ruined in the Five Towns. For the Five
+Towns, although continually complaining of bad times, is immensely
+wealthy, as well as immensely poor--a country of contrasts,
+indeed--and private carriages, if they do not abound, exist at any
+rate in sufficient numbers.
+
+Nay, more, automobiles of the most expensive French and English
+makes fly dashingly along its hilly roads and scatter in profusion
+the rich black mud thereof.
+
+On a Saturday afternoon in last spring, such an automobile stood
+outside the garden entrance of Bleakridge House, just halfway
+between Hanbridge and Bursley. It belonged to young Harold Etches,
+of Etches, Limited, the great porcelain manufacturers.
+
+It was a 20 h.p. Panhard, and was worth over a thousand pounds as
+it stood there, throbbing, and Harold was proud of it.
+
+He was also proud of his young wife, Maud, who, clad in several
+hundred pounds' worth of furs, had taken her seat next to the
+steering-wheel, and was waiting for Harold to mount by her side.
+The united ages of this handsome and gay couple came to less than
+forty-five.
+
+And they owned the motor-car, and Bleakridge House with its ten
+bedrooms, and another house at Llandudno, and a controlling
+interest in Etches, Limited, that brought them in seven or eight
+thousand a year. They were a pretty tidy example of what the Five
+Towns can do when it tries to be wealthy.
+
+At that moment, when Harold was climbing into the car, a shabby
+old man who was walking down the road, followed by a boy carrying
+a carpet-bag, stopped suddenly and touched Harold on the shoulder.
+
+'Bless us!' exclaimed the old man. And the boy and the carpet-bag
+halted behind him.
+
+'What? Uncle Dan?' said Harold.
+
+'Uncle Dan!' cried Maud, springing up with an enchanting smile.
+'Why, it's ages since--'
+
+'And what d'ye reckon ye'n gotten here?' demanded the old man.
+
+'It's my new car,' Harold explained.
+
+'And ca'st drive it, lad?' asked the old man.
+
+'I should think I could!' said Harold confidently.
+
+'H'm!' commented the old man, and then he shook hands, and
+thoroughly scrutinized Maud.
+
+Now, this is the sort of thing that can only be seen and
+appreciated in a district like the Five Towns, where families
+spring into splendour out of nothing in the course of a couple of
+generations, and as often as not sink back again into nothing in
+the course of two generations more.
+
+The Etches family is among the best known and the widest spread in
+the Five Towns. It originated in three brothers, of whom Daniel
+was the youngest. Daniel never married; the other two did. Daniel
+was not very fond of money; the other two were, and they founded
+the glorious firm of Etches. Harold was the grandson of one
+brother, and Maud was the Granddaughter of the other.
+Consequently, they both stood in the same relation to Dan, who was
+their great-uncle--addressed as uncle 'for short'.
+
+There is a good deal of snobbery in the Five Towns, but it does
+not exist between relatives. The relatives in danger of suffering
+by it would never stand it. Besides, although Dan's income did not
+exceed two hundred a year, he was really richer than his
+grandnephew, since Dan lived on half his income, whereas Harold,
+aided by Maud, lived on all of his.
+
+Consequently, despite the vast difference in their stations,
+clothes, and manners, Daniel and his young relatives met as
+equals. It would have been amusing to see anyone--even the
+Countess of Chell, who patronized the entire district--attempt to
+patronize Dan.
+
+In his time he had been the greatest pigeon-fancier in the
+country.
+
+'So you're paying a visit to Bursley, uncle?' said Maud.
+
+'Aye!' Dan replied. 'I'm back i' owd Bosley. Sarah--my
+housekeeper, thou know'st--'
+
+'Not dead?'
+
+'No. Her inna' dead; but her sister's dead, and I've give her a
+week's play [holiday], and come away. Rat Edge'll see nowt o' me
+this side Easter.'
+
+Rat Edge was the name of the village, five miles off, which Dan
+had honoured in his declining years.
+
+'And where are you going to now?' asked Harold.
+
+'I'm going to owd Sam Shawn's, by th' owd church, to beg a bed.'
+
+'But you'll stop with us, of course?' said Harold.
+
+'Nay, lad,' said Dan.
+
+'Oh yes, uncle,' Maud insisted.
+
+'Nay, lass,' said Dan.
+
+'Indeed, you will, uncle,' said Maud positively. 'If you don't,
+I'll never speak to you again.'
+
+She had a charming fire in her eyes, had Maud.
+
+Daniel, the old bachelor, yielded at once, but in his own style.
+
+'I'll try it for a night, lass,' said he.
+
+Thus it occurred that the carpet-bag was carried into Bleakridge
+House, and that after some delay Harold and Maud carried off Uncle
+Dan with them in the car. He sat in the luxurious tonneau behind,
+and Maud had quitted her husband in order to join him. Possibly
+she liked the humorous wrinkles round his grey eyes. Or it may
+have been the eyes themselves. And yet Dan was nearer seventy than
+sixty.
+
+The car passed everything on the road; it seemed to be overtaking
+electric trams all the time.
+
+'So ye'n been married a year?' said Uncle Dan, smiling at Maud.
+
+'Oh yes; a year and three days. We're quite used to it.'
+
+'Us'n be in h-ll in a minute, wench!' exclaimed Dan, calmly
+changing the topic, as Harold swung the car within an inch of a
+brewer's dray, and skidded slightly in the process. No anti-
+skidding device would operate in that generous, oozy mud.
+
+And, as a matter of fact, they were in Hanbridge the next minute--
+Hanbridge, the centre of the religions, the pleasures, and the
+vices of the Five Towns.
+
+'Bless us!' said the old man. 'It's fifteen year and more since I
+were here.'
+
+'Harold,' said Maud, 'let's stop at the Piccadilly Cafe and have
+some tea.'
+
+'Cafe?' asked Dan. 'What be that?'
+
+'It's a kind of a pub.' Harold threw the explanation over his
+shoulder as he brought the car up with swift dexterity in front of
+the Misses Callear's newly opened afternoon tea-rooms.
+
+'Oh, well, if it's a pub,' said Uncle Dan, 'I dunna' object.'
+
+He frankly admitted, on entering, that he had never before seen a
+pub full of little tables and white cloths, and flowers, and young
+women, and silver teapots, and cake-stands. And though he did pour
+his tea into his saucer, he was sufficiently at home there to
+address the younger Miss Callear as 'young woman', and to inform
+her that her beverage was lacking in Orange Pekoe. And the Misses
+Callear, who conferred a favour on their customers in serving
+them, didn't like it.
+
+He became reminiscent.
+
+'Aye!' he said, 'when I left th' Five Towns fifty-two years sin'
+to go weaving i' Derbyshire wi' my mother's brother, tay were ten
+shilling a pun'. Us had it when us were sick--which wasna' often.
+We worked too hard for be sick. Hafe past five i' th' morning till
+eight of a night, and then Saturday afternoon walk ten mile to
+Glossop with a week's work on ye' back, and home again wi' th'
+brass.
+
+'They've lost th' habit of work now-a-days, seemingly,' he went
+on, as the car moved off once more, but slowly, because of the
+vast crowds emerging from the Knype football ground. 'It's
+football, Saturday; bands of a Sunday; football, Monday; ill i'
+bed and getting round, Tuesday; do a bit o' work Wednesday;
+football, Thursday; draw wages Friday night; and football,
+Saturday. And wages higher than ever. It's that as beats me--
+wages higher than ever--
+
+'Ye canna' smoke with any comfort i' these cars,' he added, when
+Harold had got clear of the crowds and was letting out. He
+regretfully put his pipe in his pocket.
+
+Harold skirted the whole length of the Five Towns from south to
+north, at an average rate of perhaps thirty miles an hour; and
+quite soon the party found itself on the outer side of Turnhill,
+and descending the terrible Clough Bank, three miles long, and of
+a steepness resembling the steepness of the side of a house.
+
+The car had warmed to its business, and Harold took them down that
+declivity in a manner which startled even Maud, who long ago had
+resigned herself to the fact that she was tied for life to a young
+man for whom the word 'danger' had no meaning.
+
+At the bottom they had a swerve skid; but as there was plenty of
+room for eccentricities, nothing happened except that the car
+tried to climb the hill again.
+
+'Well, if I'd known,' observed Uncle Dan, 'if I'd guessed as you
+were reservin' this treat for th' owd uncle, I'd ha' walked.'
+
+The Etches blood in him was pretty cool, but his nerve had had a
+shaking.
+
+Then Harold could not restart the car. The engine had stopped of
+its own accord, and, though Harold lavished much physical force on
+the magic handle in front, nothing would budge. Maud and the old
+man got down, the latter with relief.
+
+'Stuck, eh?' said Dan. 'No steam?'
+
+'That's it!' Harold cried, slapping his leg. 'What an ass I am!
+She wants petrol, that's all. Maud, pass a couple of cans. They're
+under the seat there, behind. No; on the left, child.'
+
+However, there was no petrol on the car.
+
+'That's that cursed Durand' (Durand being the new chauffeur--
+French, to match the car). 'I told him not to forget. Last thing I
+said to the fool! Maud, I shall chuck that chap!'
+
+'Can't we do anything?' asked Maud stiffly, putting her lips
+together.
+
+'We can walk back to Turnhill and buy some petrol, some of us!'
+snapped Harold. 'That's what we can do!'
+
+'Sithee,' said Uncle Dan. 'There's the Plume o' Feathers half-a-
+mile back. Th' landlord's a friend o' mine. I can borrow his mare
+and trap, and drive to Turnhill and fetch some o' thy petrol, as
+thou calls it.'
+
+'It's awfully good of you, uncle.'
+
+'Nay, lad, I'm doing it for please mysen. But Maud mun come wi'
+me. Give us th' money for th' petrol, as thou calls it.'
+
+'Then I must stay here alone?' Harold complained.
+
+'Seemingly,' the old man agreed.
+
+After a few words on pigeons, and a glass of beer, Dan had no
+difficulty whatever in borrowing his friend's white mare and black
+trap. He himself helped in the harnessing. Just as he was driving
+triumphantly away, with that delicious vision Maud on his left
+hand and a stable-boy behind, he reined the mare in.
+
+'Give us a couple o' penny smokes, matey,' he said to the
+landlord, and lit one.
+
+The mare could go, and Dan could make her go, and she did go. And
+the whole turn-out looked extremely dashing when, ultimately, it
+dashed into the glare of the acetylene lamps which the deserted
+Harold had lighted on his car.
+
+The red end of a penny smoke in the gloom of twilight looks
+exactly as well as the red end of an Havana. Moreover, the mare
+caracolled ornamentally in the rays of the acetylene, and the
+stable-boy had to skip down quick and hold her head.
+
+'How much didst say this traction-engine had cost thee?' Dan
+asked, while Harold was pouring the indispensable fluid into the
+tank.
+
+'Not far off twelve hundred,' answered Harold lightly. 'Keep that
+cigar away from here.'
+
+'Fifteen pun' ud buy this mare,' Dan announced to the road.
+
+'Now, all aboard!' Harold commanded at length. 'How much shall I
+give to the boy for the horse and trap, uncle?'
+
+'Nothing,' said Dan. 'I havena' finished wi' that mare yet. Didst
+think I was going to trust mysen i' that thing o' yours again?
+I'll meet thee at Bleakridge, lad.'
+
+'And I think I'll go with uncle too, Harold,' said Maud.
+
+Whereupon they both got into the trap.
+
+Harold stared at them, astounded.
+
+'But I say--' he protested, beginning to be angry.
+
+Uncle Dan drove away like the wind, and the stable-boy had all he
+could do to clamber up behind.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Now, at dinner-time that night, in the dining-room of the
+commodious and well-appointed mansion of the youngest and richest
+of the Etches, Uncle Dan stood waiting and waiting for his host
+and hostess to appear. He was wearing a Turkish tasselled smoking-
+cap to cover his baldness, and he had taken off his jacket and put
+on his light, loose overcoat instead of it, since that was a
+comfortable habit of his.
+
+He sent one of the two parlourmaids upstairs for his carpet
+slippers out of the carpet-bag, and he passed part of the time in
+changing his boots for his slippers in front of the fire. Then at
+length, just as a maid was staggering out under the load of those
+enormous boots, Harold appeared, very correct, but alone.
+
+'Awfully sorry to keep you waiting, uncle,' said Harold, 'but Maud
+isn't well. She isn't coming down tonight.'
+
+'What's up wi' Maud?'
+
+'Oh, goodness knows!' responded Harold gloomily. 'She's not well--
+that's all.'
+
+'H'm!' said Dan. 'Well, let's peck a bit.'
+
+So they sat down and began to peck a bit, aided by the two maids.
+Dan pecked with prodigious enthusiasm, but Harold was not in good
+pecking form. And as the dinner progressed, and Harold sent dish
+after dish up to his wife, and his wife returned dish after dish
+untouched, Harold's gloom communicated itself to the house in
+general.
+
+One felt that if one had penetrated to the farthest corner of the
+farthest attic, a little parcel of spiritual gloom would have
+already arrived there. The sense of disaster was in the abode. The
+cook was prophesying like anything in the kitchen. Durand in the
+garage was meditating upon such of his master's pithy remarks as
+he had been able to understand.
+
+When the dinner was over, and the coffee and liqueurs and cigars
+had been served, and the two maids had left the dining-room, Dan
+turned to his grandnephew and said--
+
+'There's things as has changed since my time, lad, but human
+nature inna' one on em.'
+
+'What do you mean, uncle?' Harold asked awkwardly, self-
+consciously.
+
+'I mean as thou'rt a dashed foo'!'
+
+'Why?'
+
+'But thou'lt get better o' that,' said Dan.
+
+Harold smiled sheepishly.
+
+'I don't know what you're driving at, uncle,' said he.
+
+'Yes, thou dost, lad. Thou'st been and quarrelled wi' Maud. And I
+say thou'rt a dashed foo'!'
+
+'As a matter of fact--' Harold stammered.
+
+'And ye've never quarrelled afore. This is th' fust time. And so
+thou'st under th' impression that th' world's come to an end.
+Well, th' fust quarrel were bound to come sooner or later.'
+
+'It isn't really a quarrel--it's about nothing--'
+
+'I know--I know,' Dan broke in. 'They always are. As for it not
+being a quarrel, lad, call it a picnic if thou'st a mind. But
+heir's sulking upstairs, and thou'rt sulking down here.'
+
+'She was cross about the petrol,' said Harold, glad to relieve his
+mind. 'I hadn't a notion she was cross till I went up into the
+bedroom. Not a notion! I explained to her it wasn't my fault. I
+argued it out with her very calmly. I did my best to reason with
+her--'
+
+'Listen here, young 'un,' Dan interrupted him. 'How old art?'
+
+'Twenty-three.'
+
+'Thou may'st live another fifty years. If thou'st a mind to spend
+'em i' peace, thoud'st better give up reasoning wi' women. Give it
+up right now! It's worse nor drink, as a habit. Kiss 'em, cuddle
+'em, beat 'em. But dunna' reason wi' 'em.'
+
+'What should you have done in my place?' Harold asked.
+
+'I should ha' told Maud her was quite right.'
+
+'But she wasn't.'
+
+'Then I should ha' winked at mysen i' th' glass,' continued Dan,
+'and kissed her.'
+
+'That's all very well--'
+
+'Naturally,' said Dan, 'her wanted to show off that car i' front
+o' me. That was but natural. And her was vexed when it went
+wrong.'
+
+'But I told her--I explained to her.'
+
+'Her's a handsome little wench,' Dan proceeded. 'And a good heart.
+But thou'st got ten times her brains, lad, and thou ought'st to
+ha' given in.'
+
+'But I can't always be--'
+
+'It's allus them as gives in as has their own way. I remember her
+grandfather--he was th' eldest o' us--he quarrelled wi' his wife
+afore they'd been married a week, and she raced him all over th'
+town wi' a besom--'
+
+'With a besom, uncle?' exclaimed Harold, shocked at these family
+disclosures.
+
+'Wi' a besom,' said Dan. That come o' reasoning wi' a woman. It
+taught him a lesson, I can tell thee. And afterwards he always
+said as nowt was worth a quarrel--NOWT! And it isna'.'
+
+'I don't think Maud will race me all over the town with a besom,'
+Harold remarked reflectively.
+
+'There's worse things nor that,' said Dan. 'Look thee here, get
+out o' th' house for a' 'our. Go to th' Conservative Club, and
+then come back. Dost understand?'
+
+'But what--'
+
+'Hook it, lad!' said Dan curtly.
+
+And just as Harold was leaving the room, like a school-boy, he
+called him in again.
+
+'I havena' told thee, Harold, as I'm subject to attacks. I'm
+getting up in years. I go off like. It isna' fits, but I go off.
+And if it should happen while I'm here, dunna' be alarmed.'
+
+'What are we to do?'
+
+'Do nothing. I come round in a minute or two. Whatever ye do,
+dunna' give me brandy. It might kill me--so th' doctor says. I'm
+only telling thee in case.'
+
+'Well, I hope you won't have an attack,' said Harold.
+
+'It's a hundred to one I dunna',' said Dan.
+
+And Harold departed.
+
+Soon afterwards Uncle Dan wandered into a kitchen full of
+servants.
+
+'Show me th' missis's bedroom, one on ye,' he said to the crowd.
+
+And presently he was knocking at Maud's door.
+
+'Maudie!'
+
+'Who is it?' came a voice.
+
+'It's thy owd uncle. Can'st spare a minute?'
+
+Maud appeared at the door, smiling, and arrayed in a peignoir.
+
+'HE'S gone out,' said Dan, implying scorn of the person who had
+gone out. 'Wilt come down-stairs?'
+
+'Where's he gone to?' Maud demanded.
+
+She didn't even pretend she was ill.
+
+'Th' Club,' said Dan.
+
+And in about a hundred seconds or so he had her in the drawing-
+room, and she was actually pouring out gin for him. She looked
+ravishing in that peignoir, especially as she was munching an
+apple, and balancing herself on the arm of a chair.
+
+'So he's been quarrelling with ye, Maud?' Dan began.
+
+'No; not quarrelling, uncle.'
+
+'Well, call it what ye'n a mind,' said Dan. 'Call it a prayer-
+meeting. I didn't notice as ye came down for supper--dinner, as ye
+call it.'
+
+'It was like this, uncle,' she said. 'Poor Harry was very angry
+with himself about that petrol. Of course, he wanted the car to go
+well while you were in it; and he came up-stairs and grumbled at
+me for leaving him all alone and driving home with you.'
+
+'Oh, did he?' exclaimed Dan.
+
+'Yes. I explained to him that of course I couldn't leave you all
+alone. Then he got hot. I kept quite calm. I reasoned it out with
+him as quietly as I could--'
+
+'Maudie, Maudie,' protested the old man, 'thou'rt th' prettiest
+wench i' this town, though I AM thy great-uncle, and thou'st got
+plenty o' brains--a sight more than that husband o' thine.'
+
+'Do you think so, uncle?'
+
+'Aye, but thou hasna' made use o' 'em tonight. Thou'rt a foolish
+wench, wench. At thy time o' life, and after a year o' th' married
+state, thou ought'st to know better than reason wi' a man in a
+temper.'
+
+'But, really, uncle, it was so absurd of Harold, wasn't it?'
+
+'Aye!' said Dan. 'But why didst-na' give in and kiss him, and
+smack his face for him?'
+
+'There was nothing to give in about, uncle.'
+
+'There never is,' said Dan. 'There never is. That's the point.
+Still, thou'rt nigh crying, wench.'
+
+'I'm not, uncle,' she contradicted, the tears falling on to the
+apple.
+
+'And Harold's using bad language all up Trafalgar Road, I lay,'
+Dan added.
+
+'It was all Harold's fault,' said Maud.
+
+'Why, in course it were Harold's fault. But nowt's worth a
+quarrel, my dear--NOWT. I remember Harold's grandfeyther--he were
+th' second of us, your grandfeyther were the eldest, and I were
+the youngest--I remember Harold's grandfeyther chasing his wife
+all over th' town wi' a besom a week after they were married.'
+
+'With a besom!' murmured Maud, pained and forgetting to cry.
+'Harold's grandfather, not mine?'
+
+'Wi' a besom,' Dan repeated, nodding. 'They never quarrelled
+again--ne'er again. Th' old woman allus said after that as
+quarrels were for fools. And her was right.'
+
+'I don't see Harold chasing me across Bursley with a besom,' said
+Maud primly. 'But what you say is quite right, you dear old uncle.
+Men are queer--I mean husbands. You can't argue with them. You'd
+much better give in--'
+
+'And have your own way after all.'
+
+'And perhaps Harold was--'
+
+Harold's step could be heard in the hall.
+
+'Oh, dear!' cried Maud. 'What shall I do?'
+
+'I'm not feeling very well,' whispered Uncle Dan weakly. 'I have
+these 'ere attacks sometimes. There's only one thing as'll do me
+any good--brandy.'
+
+And his head fell over one side of the chair, and he looked
+precisely like a corpse.
+
+'Maud, what are you doing?' almost shouted Harold, when he came
+into the room.
+
+She was putting a liqueur-glass to Uncle Dan's lips.
+
+'Oh, Harold,' she cried, 'uncle's had an attack of some sort. I'm
+giving him some brandy.'
+
+'But you mustn't give him brandy,' said Harold authoritatively to
+her.
+
+'But I MUST give him brandy,' said Maud. 'He told me that brandy
+was the only thing to save him.'
+
+'Nonsense, child!' Harold persisted. 'Uncle told ME all about
+these attacks. They're perfectly harmless so long as he doesn't
+have brandy. The doctors have warned him that brandy will be
+fatal.'
+
+'Harold, you are absolutely mistaken. Don't you understand that
+uncle has only this minute told me that he MUST have brandy?'
+
+And she again approached the glass to the pale lips of the old
+man. His tasselled Turkish smoking-cap had fallen to the floor,
+and the hemisphere of his bald head glittered under the gas.
+
+'Maud, I forbid you!' And Harold put a hand on the glass. 'It's a
+matter of life and death. You must have misunderstood uncle.'
+
+'It was you who misunderstood uncle,' said Maud. 'Of course, if
+you mean to prevent me by brute force--'
+
+They both paused and glanced at Daniel, and then at each other.
+
+'Perhaps you are right, dearest,' said Harold, in a new tone.
+
+'No, dearest,' said Maud, also in a new tone. 'I expect you are
+right. I must have misunderstood.'
+
+'No, no, Maud. Give him the brandy by all means. I've no doubt
+you're right.'
+
+'But if you think I'd better not give it him--'
+
+'But I would prefer you to give it him, dearest. It isn't likely
+you would be mistaken in a thing like that.'
+
+'I would prefer to be guided by you, dearest,' said Maud.
+
+So they went on for several minutes, each giving way to the other
+in the most angelic manner.
+
+'AND MEANTIME I'M SUPPOSED TO BE DYING, AM I?' roared Uncle Dan,
+suddenly sitting up. 'You'd let th' old uncle peg out while you
+practise his precepts! A nice pair you make! I thought for see
+which on ye' ud' give way to th' other, but I didna' anticipate as
+both on ye 'ud be ready to sacrifice my life for th' sake o'
+domestic peace.'
+
+'But, uncle,' they both said later, amid the universal and yet
+rather shamefaced peace rejoicings, 'you said nothing was worth a
+quarrel.'
+
+'And I was right,' answered Dan; 'I was right. Th' Divorce Court
+is full o' fools as have begun married life by trying to convince
+the other fool, instead o' humouring him--or her. Kiss us, Maud.'
+
+
+
+
+THE DEATH OF SIMON FUGE
+
+
+It was in the train that I learnt of his death. Although a very
+greedy eater of literature, I can only enjoy reading when I have
+little time for reading. Give me three hours of absolute leisure,
+with nothing to do but read, and I instantly become almost
+incapable of the act. So it is always on railway journeys, and so
+it was that evening. I was in the middle of Wordsworth's
+Excursion; I positively gloated over it, wondering why I should
+have allowed a mere rumour that it was dull to prevent me from
+consuming it earlier in my life. But do you suppose I could
+continue with Wordsworth in the train? I could not. I stared out
+of the windows; I calculated the speed of the train by my watch; I
+thought of my future and my past; I drew forth my hopes, examined
+them, polished them, and put them back again; I forgave myself for
+my sins; and I dreamed of the exciting conquest of a beautiful and
+brilliant woman that I should one day achieve. In short, I did
+everything that men habitually do under such circumstances. The
+Gazette was lying folded on the seat beside me: one of the two
+London evening papers that a man of taste may peruse without
+humiliating himself. How appetizing a morsel, this sheet new and
+smooth from the press, this sheet written by an ironic,
+understanding, small band of men for just a few thousand persons
+like me, ruthlessly scornful of the big circulations and the idols
+of the people! If the Gazette and its sole rival ceased to appear,
+I do believe that my existence and many similar existences would
+wear a different colour. Could one dine alone in Jermyn Street or
+Panton Street without this fine piquant evening commentary on the
+gross newspapers of the morning? (Now you perceive what sort of a
+man I am, and you guess, rightly, that my age is between thirty
+and forty.) But the train had stopped at Rugby and started again,
+and more than half of my journey was accomplished, ere at length I
+picked up the Gazette, and opened it with the false calm of a
+drunkard who has sworn that he will not wet his lips before a
+certain hour. For, well knowing from experience that I should
+suffer acute ennui in the train, I had, when buying the Gazette at
+Euston, taken oath that I would not even glance at it till after
+Rugby; it is always the final hour of these railway journeys that
+is the nethermost hell.
+
+The second thing that I saw in the Gazette (the first was of
+course the 'Entremets' column of wit, humour, and parody, very
+uneven in its excellence) was the death of Simon Fuge. There was
+nearly a column about it, signed with initials, and the subheading
+of the article ran, 'Sudden death of a great painter'. That was
+characteristic of the Gazette. That Simon Fuge was indeed a great
+painter is now admitted by most dilettantes, though denied by a
+few. But to the great public he was not one of the few great
+names. To the great public he was just a medium name. Ten to one
+that in speaking of him to a plain person you would feel compelled
+to add: 'The painter, you know,' and the plain person would
+respond: 'Oh yes,' falsely pretending that he was perfectly
+familiar with the name. Simon Fuge had many friends on the press,
+and it was solely owing to the loyalty of these friends in the
+matter of obituary notices that the great public heard more of
+Simon Fuge in the week after his death than it had heard of him
+during the thirty-five years of his life. It may be asked: Why, if
+he had so many and such loyal friends on the press, these friends
+did not take measures to establish his reputation before he died?
+The answer is that editors will not allow journalists to praise a
+living artist much in excess of the esteem in which the public
+holds him; they are timid. But when a misunderstood artist is dead
+the editors will put no limit on laudation. I am not on the press,
+but it happens that I know the world.
+
+Of all the obituary notices of Simon Fuge, the Gazette's was the
+first. Somehow the Gazette had obtained exclusive news of the
+little event, and some one high up on the Gazette's staff had a
+very exalted notion indeed of Fuge, and must have known him
+personally. Fuge received his deserts as a painter in that column
+of print. He was compared to Sorolla y Bastida for vitality; the
+morbidezza of his flesh-tints was stated to be unrivalled even by
+--I forget the name, painting is not my speciality. The writer
+blandly inquired why examples of Fuge's work were to be seen in
+the Luxembourg, at Vienna, at Florence, at Dresden; and not, for
+instance, at the Tate Gallery, or in the Chantrey collection. The
+writer also inquired, with equal blandness, why a painter who had
+been on the hanging committee of the Societe Nationale des Beaux
+Arts at Paris should not have been found worthy to be even an
+A.R.A. in London. In brief, old England 'caught it', as occurred
+somewhere or other most nights in the columns of the Gazette. Fuge
+also received his deserts as a man. And the Gazette did not
+conceal that he had not been a man after the heart of the British
+public. He had been too romantically and intensely alive for that.
+The writer gave a little penportrait of him. It was very good,
+recalling his tricks of manner, his unforgettable eyes, and his
+amazing skill in talking about himself and really interesting
+everybody in himself. There was a special reference to one of
+Fuge's most dramatic recitals--a narration of a night spent in a
+boat on Ham Lake with two beautiful girls, sisters, natives of the
+Five Towns, where Fuge was born. Said the obituarist: 'Those two
+wonderful creatures who played so large a part in Simon Fuge's
+life.'
+
+This death was a shock to me. It took away my ennui for the rest
+of the journey. I too had known Simon Fuge. That is to say, I had
+met him once, at a soiree, and on that single occasion, as luck
+had it, he had favoured the company with the very narration to
+which the Gazette contributor referred. I remembered well the
+burning brilliance of his blue-black eyes, his touching assurance
+that all of us were necessarily interested in his adventures, and
+the extremely graphic and convincing way in which he reconstituted
+for us the nocturnal scene on Ham Lake--the two sisters, the boat,
+the rustle of trees, the lights on shore, and his own difficulty
+in managing the oars, one of which he lost for half-an-hour and
+found again. It was by such details as that about the oar that,
+with a tint of humour, he added realism to the romantic quality of
+his tales. He seemed to have no reticences concerning himself.
+Decidedly he allowed things to be understood...! Yes, his was a
+romantic figure, the figure of one to whom every day, and every
+hour of the day, was coloured by the violence of his passion for
+existence. His pictures had often an unearthly beauty, but for him
+they were nothing but faithful renderings of what he saw.
+
+My mind dwelt on those two beautiful sisters. Those two beautiful
+sisters appealed to me more than anything else in the Gazette's
+obituary. Surely--Simon Fuge had obviously been a man whose
+emotional susceptibility and virile impulsiveness must have opened
+the door for him to multifarious amours--but surely he had not
+made himself indispensable to both sisters simultaneously. Surely
+even he had not so far forgotten that Ham Lake was in the middle
+of a country called England, and not the ornamental water in the
+Bois de Boulogne! And yet.... The delicious possibility of
+ineffable indiscretions on the part of Simon Fuge monopolized my
+mind till the train stopped at Knype, and I descended.
+Nevertheless, I think I am a serious and fairly insular
+Englishman. It is truly astonishing how a serious person can be
+obsessed by trifles that, to speak mildly, do not merit sustained
+attention.
+
+I wondered where Ham Lake was. I knew merely that it lay somewhere
+in the environs of the Five Towns. What put fuel on the fire of my
+interest in the private affairs of the dead painter was the
+slightly curious coincidence that on the evening of the news of
+his death I should be travelling to the Five Towns--and for the
+first time in my life. Here I was at Knype, which, as I had
+gathered from Bradshaw, and from my acquaintance Brindley, was the
+traffic centre of the Five Towns.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+My knowledge of industrial districts amounted to nothing. Born in
+Devonshire, educated at Cambridge, and fulfilling my destiny as
+curator of a certain department of antiquities at the British
+Museum, I had never been brought into contact with the vast
+constructive material activities of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and
+Staffordshire. I had but passed through them occasionally on my
+way to Scotland, scorning their necessary grime with the perhaps
+too facile disdain of the clean-faced southerner, who is apt to
+forget that coal cannot walk up unaided out of the mine, and that
+the basin in which he washes his beautiful purity can only be
+manufactured amid conditions highly repellent. Well, my
+impressions of the platform of Knype station were unfavourable.
+There was dirt in the air; I could feel it at once on my skin. And
+the scene was shabby, undignified, and rude. I use the word 'rude'
+in all its senses. What I saw was a pushing, exclamatory, ill-
+dressed, determined crowd, each member of which was bent on the
+realization of his own desires by the least ceremonious means. If
+an item of this throng wished to get past me, he made me instantly
+aware of his wish by abruptly changing my position in infinite
+space; it was not possible to misconstrue his meaning. So much
+crude force and naked will-to-live I had not before set eyes on.
+In truth, I felt myself to be a very brittle, delicate bit of
+intellectual machinery in the midst of all these physical
+manifestations. Yet I am a tallish man, and these potters appeared
+to me to be undersized, and somewhat thin too! But what elbows!
+What glaring egoistic eyes! What terrible decisiveness in action!
+
+'Now then, get in if ye're going!' said a red-haired porter to me
+curtly.
+
+'I'm not going. I've just got out,' I replied.
+
+'Well, then, why dunna' ye stand out o' th' wee and let them get
+in as wants to?'
+
+Unable to offer a coherent answer to this crushing demand, I stood
+out of the way. In the light of further knowledge I now surmise
+that that porter was a very friendly and sociable porter. But at
+the moment I really believed that, taking me for the least
+admirable and necessary of God's creatures, he meant to convey his
+opinion to me for my own good. I glanced up at the lighted windows
+of the train, and saw the composed, careless faces of haughty
+persons who were going direct from London to Manchester, and to
+whom the Five Towns was nothing but a delay. I envied them. I
+wanted to return to the shelter of the train. When it left, I
+fancied that my last link with civilization was broken. Then
+another train puffed in, and it was simply taken by assault in a
+fraction of time, to an incomprehensible bawling of friendly
+sociable porters. Season-ticket holders at Finsbury Park think
+they know how to possess themselves of a train; they are deceived.
+So this is where Simon Fuge came from (I reflected)! The devil it
+is (I reflected)! I tried to conceive what the invaders of the
+train would exclaim if confronted by one of Simon Fuge's pictures.
+I could imagine only one word, and that a monosyllable, that would
+meet the case of their sentiments. And his dalliance, his
+tangential nocturnal deviations in gondolas with exquisite twin
+odalisques! There did not seem to be much room for amorous
+elegance in the lives of these invaders. And his death! What would
+they say of his death? Upon my soul, as I stood on that dirty
+platform, in a milieu of advertisements of soap, boots, and
+aperients, I began to believe that Simon Fuge never had lived,
+that he was a mere illusion of his friends and his small public.
+All that I saw around me was a violent negation of Simon Fuge,
+that entity of rare, fine, exotic sensibilities, that perfectly
+mad gourmet of sensations, that exotic seer of beauty.
+
+I caught sight of my acquaintance and host, Mr Robert Brindley,
+coming towards me on the platform. Hitherto I had only met him in
+London, when, as chairman of the committee of management of the
+Wedgwood Institution and School of Art at Bursley, he had called
+on me at the British Museum for advice as to loan exhibits. He was
+then dressed like a self-respecting tourist. Now, although an
+architect by profession, he appeared to be anxious to be mistaken
+for a sporting squire. He wore very baggy knickerbockers, and
+leggings, and a cap. This raiment was apparently the agreed
+uniform of the easy classes in the Five Towns; for in the crowd I
+had noticed several such consciously superior figures among the
+artisans. Mr Brindley, like most of the people in the station, had
+a slightly pinched and chilled air, as though that morning he had
+by inadvertence omitted to don those garments which are not seen.
+He also, like most of the people there, but not to the same
+extent, had a somewhat suspicious and narrowly shrewd regard, as
+who should say: 'If any person thinks he can get the better of me
+by a trick, let him try--that's all.' But the moment his eye
+encountered mine, this expression vanished from his face, and he
+gave me a candid smile.
+
+'I hope you're well,' he said gravely, squeezing my hand in a sort
+of vice that he carried at the end of his right arm.
+
+I reassured him.
+
+'Oh, I'm all right,' he said, in response to the expression of my
+hopes.
+
+It was a relief to me to see him. He took charge of me. I felt, as
+it were, safe in his arms. I perceived that, unaided and
+unprotected, I should never have succeeded in reaching Bursley
+from Knype.
+
+A whistle sounded.
+
+'Better get in,' he suggested; and then in a tone of absolute
+command: 'Give me your bag.'
+
+I obeyed. He opened the door of a first-class carriage.
+
+'I'm travelling second,' I explained.
+
+'Never mind. Get in.'
+
+In his tones was a kindly exasperation.
+
+I got in; he followed. The train moved.
+
+'Ah!' breathed Mr Brindley, blowing out much air and falling like
+a sack of coal into a corner seat. He was a thin man, aged about
+thirty, with brown eyes, and a short blonde beard.
+
+Conversation was at first difficult. Personally I am not a
+bubbling fount of gay nothings when I find myself alone with a
+comparative stranger. My drawbridge goes up as if by magic, my
+postern is closed, and I peer cautiously through the narrow slits
+of my turret to estimate the chances of peril. Nor was Mr Brindley
+offensively affable. However, we struggled into a kind of chatter.
+I had come to the Five Towns, on behalf of the British Museum, to
+inspect and appraise, with a view to purchase by the nation, some
+huge slip-decorated dishes, excessively curious according to
+photographs, which had been discovered in the cellars of the
+Conservative Club at Bursley. Having shared in the negotiations
+for my visit, Mr Brindley had invited me to spend the night at his
+house. We were able to talk about all this. And when we had talked
+about all this we were able to talk about the singular scenery of
+coal dust, potsherds, flame and steam, through which the train
+wound its way. It was squalid ugliness, but it was squalid
+ugliness on a scale so vast and overpowering that it became
+sublime. Great furnaces gleamed red in the twilight, and their
+fires were reflected in horrible black canals; processions of
+heavy vapour drifted in all directions across the sky, over what
+acres of mean and miserable brown architecture! The air was alive
+with the most extraordinary, weird, gigantic sounds. I do not
+think the Five Towns will ever be described: Dante lived too soon.
+As for the erratic and exquisite genius, Simon Fuge, and his
+odalisques reclining on silken cushions on the enchanted bosom of
+a lake--I could no longer conjure them up even faintly in my mind.
+
+'I suppose you know Simon Fuge is dead?' I remarked, in a pause.
+
+'No! Is he?' said Mr Brindley, with interest. 'Is it in the
+paper?'
+
+He did not seem to be quite sure that it would be in the paper.
+
+'Here it is,' said I, and I passed him the Gazette.
+
+'Ha!' he exclaimed explosively. This 'Ha!' was entirely different
+from his 'Ah!' Something shot across his eyes, something
+incredibly rapid--too rapid for a wink; yet it could only be
+called a wink. It was the most subtle transmission of the beyond-
+speech that I have ever known any man accomplish, and it endeared
+Mr Brindley to me. But I knew not its significance.
+
+'What do they think of Fuge down here?' I asked.
+
+'I don't expect they think of him,' said my host.
+
+He pulled a pouch and a packet of cigarette papers from his
+pocket.
+
+'Have one of mine,' I suggested, hastily producing my case.
+
+He did not even glance at its contents.
+
+'No, thanks,' he said curtly.
+
+I named my brand.
+
+'My dear sir,' he said, with a return to his kindly exasperation,
+'no cigarette that is not fresh made can be called a cigarette.' I
+stood corrected. 'You may pay as much as you like, but you can
+never buy cigarettes as good as I can make out of an ounce of
+fresh B.D.V. tobacco. Can you roll one?' I had to admit that I
+could not, I who in Bloomsbury was accepted as an authority on
+cigarettes as well as on porcelain. 'I'll roll you one, and you
+shall try it.'
+
+He did so.
+
+I gathered from his solemnity that cigarettes counted in the life
+of Mr Brindley. He could not take cigarettes other than seriously.
+The worst of it was that he was quite right. The cigarette which
+he constructed for me out of his wretched B.D.V. tobacco was
+adorable, and I have made my own cigarettes ever since. You will
+find B.D.V. tobacco all over the haunts frequented by us of the
+Museum now-a-days, solely owing to the expertise of Mr Brindley. A
+terribly capable and positive man! He KNEW, and he knew that he
+knew.
+
+He said nothing further as to Simon Fuge. Apparently he had
+forgotten the decease.
+
+'Do you often see the Gazette?' I asked, perhaps in the hope of
+attracting him back to Fuge.
+
+'No,' he said; 'the musical criticism is too rotten.'
+
+Involuntarily I bridled. It was startling, and it was not
+agreeable, to have one's favourite organ so abruptly condemned by
+a provincial architect in knickerbockers and a cap, in the midst
+of all that industrial ugliness. What could the Five Towns know
+about art? Yet here was this fellow condemning the Gazette on
+artistic grounds. I offered no defence, because he was right--
+again. But I did not like it.
+
+'Do you ever see the Manchester Guardian?' he questioned, carrying
+the war into my camp.
+
+'No,' I said.
+
+'Pity!' he ejaculated.
+
+'I've often heard that it's a very good paper,' I said politely.
+
+'It isn't a very good paper,' he laid me low. 'It's the best paper
+in the world. Try it for a month--it gets to Euston at half-past
+eight--and then tell me what you think.'
+
+I saw that I must pull myself together. I had glided into the Five
+Towns in a mood of gentle, wise condescension. I saw that it would
+be as well, for my own honour and safety, to put on another mood
+as quickly as possible, otherwise I might be left for dead on the
+field. Certainly the fellow was provincial, curt, even brutal in
+his despisal of diplomacy. Certainly he exaggerated the importance
+of cigarettes in the great secular scheme of evolution. But he was
+a man; he was a very tonic dose. I thought it would be safer to
+assume that he knew everything, and that the British Museum knew
+very little. Yet at the British Museum he had been quite
+different, quite deferential and rather timid. Still, I liked him.
+I liked his eyes.
+
+The train stopped at an incredible station situated in the centre
+of a rolling desert whose surface consisted of broken pots and
+cinders. I expect no one to believe this.
+
+'Here we are,' said he blithely. 'No, give me the bag. Porter!'
+
+His summons to the solitary porter was like a clap of thunder.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+He lived in a low, blackish-crimson heavy-browed house at the
+corner of a street along which electric cars were continually
+thundering. There was a thin cream of mud on the pavements and
+about two inches of mud in the roadway, rich, nourishing mud like
+Indian ink half-mixed. The prospect of carrying a pound or so of
+that unique mud into a civilized house affrighted me, but Mr
+Brindley opened his door with his latchkey and entered the abode
+as unconcernedly as if some fair repentent had cleansed his feet
+with her tresses.
+
+'Don't worry too much about the dirt,' he said. 'You're in
+Bursley.'
+
+The house seemed much larger inside than out. A gas-jet burnt in
+the hall, and sombre portieres gave large mysterious hints of
+rooms. I could hear, in the distance, the noise of frizzling over
+a fire, and of a child crying. Then a tall, straight, wellmade,
+energetic woman appeared like a conjuring trick from behind a
+portiere.
+
+'How do you do, Mr Loring?' she greeted me, smiling. 'So glad to
+meet you.'
+
+'My wife,' Mr Brindley explained gravely.
+
+'Now, I may as well tell you now, Bob,' said she, still smiling at
+me. 'Bobbie's got a sore throat and it may be mumps; the chimney's
+been on fire and we're going to be summoned; and you owe me
+sixpence.'
+
+'Why do I owe you sixpence?'
+
+'Because Annie's had her baby and it's a girl.'
+
+'That's all right. Supper ready?'
+
+'Supper is waiting for you.'
+
+She laughed. 'Whenever I have anything to tell my husband, I
+always tell him at ONCE!' she said. 'No matter who's there.' She
+pronounced 'once' with a wholehearted enthusiasm for its vowel
+sound that I have never heard equalled elsewhere, and also with a
+very magnified 'w' at the beginning of it. Often when I hear the
+word 'once' pronounced in less downright parts of the world, I
+remember how they pronounce it in the Five Towns, and there rises
+up before me a complete picture of the district, its atmosphere,
+its spirit.
+
+Mr Brindley led me to a large bathroom that had a faint odour of
+warm linen. In addition to a lot of assorted white babyclothes
+there were millions of towels in that bathroom. He turned on a tap
+and the place was instantly full of steam from a jet of boiling
+water.
+
+'Now, then,' he said, 'you can start.'
+
+As he showed no intention of leaving me, I did start. 'Mind you
+don't scald yourself,' he warned me, 'that water's HOT.' While I
+was washing, he prepared to wash. I suddenly felt as if I had been
+intimate with him and his wife for about ten years.
+
+'So this is Bursley!' I murmured, taking my mouth out of a towel.
+
+'Bosley, we call it,' he said. 'Do you know the limerick--"There
+was a young woman of Bosley"?'
+
+'No.'
+
+He intoned the local limerick. It was excellently good; not meet
+for a mixed company, but a genuine delight to the true amateur.
+One good limerick deserves another. It happened that I knew a
+number of the unprinted Rossetti limericks, precious things, not
+at all easy to get at. I detailed them to Mr Brindley, and I do
+not exaggerate when I say that I impressed him. I recovered all
+the ground I had lost upon cigarettes and newspapers. He
+appreciated those limericks with a juster taste than I should have
+expected. So, afterwards, did his friends. My belief is that I am
+to this day known and revered in Bursley, not as Loring the
+porcelain expert from the British Museum, but as the man who
+first, as it were, brought the good news of the Rossetti limericks
+from Ghent to Aix.
+
+'Now, Bob,' an amicable voice shrieked femininely up from the
+ground-floor, 'am I to send the soup to the bathroom or are you
+coming down?'
+
+A limerick will make a man forget even his dinner.
+
+Mr Brindley performed once more with his eyes that something that
+was, not a wink, but a wink unutterably refined and spiritualized.
+This time I comprehended its import. Its import was to the effect
+that women are women.
+
+We descended, Mr Brindley still in his knickerbockers.
+
+'This way,' he said, drawing aside a portiere. Mrs Brindley, as we
+entered the room, was trotting a male infant round and round a
+table charged with everything digestible and indigestible. She
+handed the child, who was in its nightdress, to a maid.
+
+'Say good night to father.'
+
+'Good ni', faver,' the interesting creature piped.
+
+'By-bye, sonny,' said the father, stooping to tickle. 'I suppose,'
+he added, when maid and infant had gone, 'if one's going to have
+mumps, they may as well all have it together.'
+
+'Oh, of course,' the mother agreed cheerfully. 'I shall stick them
+all into a room.'
+
+'How many children have you?' I inquired with polite curiosity.
+
+'Three,' she said; 'that's the eldest that you've seen.'
+
+What chiefly struck me about Mrs Brindley was her serene air of
+capableness, of having a self-confidence which experience had
+richly justified. I could see that she must be an extremely
+sensible mother. And yet she had quite another aspect too--how
+shall I explain it?--as though she had only had children in her
+spare time.
+
+We sat down. The room was lighted by four candles, on the table. I
+am rather short-sighted, and so I did not immediately notice that
+there were low book-cases all round the walls. Why the presence of
+these book-cases should have caused me a certain astonishment I do
+not know, but it did. I thought of Knype station, and the scenery,
+and then the other little station, and the desert of pots and
+cinders, and the mud in the road and on the pavement and in the
+hall, and the baby-linen in the bathroom, and three children all
+down with mumps, and Mr Brindley's cap and knickerbockers and
+cigarettes; and somehow the books--I soon saw there were at least
+a thousand of them, and not circulating-library books, either, but
+BOOKS--well, they administered a little shock to me.
+
+To Mr Brindley's right hand was a bottle of Bass and a corkscrew.
+
+'Beer!' he exclaimed, with solemn ecstasy, with an ecstasy gross
+and luscious. And, drawing the cork, he poured out a glass, with
+fine skill in the management of froth, and pushed it towards me.
+
+'No, thanks,' I said.
+
+'No beer!' he murmured, with benevolent, puzzled disdain.
+'Whisky?'
+
+'No, thanks,' I said. 'Water.'
+
+'_I_ know what Mr Loring would like,' said Mrs Brindley, jumping
+up. 'I KNOW what Mr Loring would like.' She opened a cupboard and
+came back to the table with a bottle, which she planted in front
+of me. 'Wouldn't you, Mr Loring?'
+
+It was a bottle of mercurey, a wine which has given me many
+dreadful dawns, but which I have never known how to refuse.
+
+'I should,' I admitted; 'but it's very bad for me.'
+
+'Nonsense!' said she. She looked at her husband in triumph.
+
+'Beer!' repeated Mr Brindley with undiminished ecstasy, and drank
+about two-thirds of a glass at one try. Then he wiped the froth
+from his moustache. 'Ah!' he breathed low and soft. 'Beer!'
+
+They called the meal supper. The term is inadequate. No term that
+I can think of would be adequate. Of its kind the thing was
+perfect. Mrs Brindley knew that it was perfect. Mr Brindley also
+knew that it was perfect. There were prawns in aspic. I don't know
+why I should single out that dish, except that it seemed strange
+to me to have crossed the desert of pots and cinders in order to
+encounter prawns in aspic. Mr Brindley ate more cold roast beef
+than I had ever seen any man eat before, and more pickled walnuts.
+It is true that the cold roast beef transcended all the cold roast
+beef of my experience. Mrs Brindley regaled herself largely on
+trifle, which Mr Brindley would not approach, preferring a most
+glorious Stilton cheese. I lost touch, temporarily, with the
+intellectual life. It was Mr Brindley who recalled me to it.
+
+'Jane,' he said. (This was at the beef and pickles stage.)
+
+No answer.
+
+'Jane!'
+
+Mrs Brindley turned to me. 'My name is not Jane,' she said,
+laughing, and making a moue simultaneously. 'He only calls me that
+to annoy me. I told him I wouldn't answer to it, and I won't. He
+thinks I shall give in because we've got "company"! But I won't
+treat you as "company", Mr Loring, and I shall expect you to take
+my side. What dreadful weather we're having, aren't we?'
+
+'Dreadful!' I joined in the game.
+
+'Jane!'
+
+'Did you have a comfortable journey down?'
+
+'Yes, thank you.'
+
+'Well, then, Mary!' Mr Brindley yielded.
+
+'Thank you very much, Mr Loring, for your kind assistance,' said
+his wife. 'Yes, dearest?'
+
+Mr Brindley glanced at me over his second glass of beer.
+
+'If those confounded kids are going to have mumps,' he addressed
+his words apparendy into the interior of the glass, 'it probably
+means the doctor, and the doctor means money, and I shan't be able
+to afford the Hortulus Animoe.'
+
+I opened my ears.
+
+'My husband goes stark staring mad sometimes,' said Mrs Brindley
+to me. 'It lasts for a week or so, and pretty nearly lands us in
+the workhouse. This time it's the Hortulus Animoe. Do you know
+what it is? I don't.'
+
+'No,' I said, and the prestige of the British Museum trembled.
+Then I had a vague recollection. 'There's an illuminated
+manuscript of that name in the Imperial Library of Vienna, isn't
+there?'
+
+'You've got it in one,' said Mr Brindley. 'Wife, pass those
+walnuts.'
+
+'You aren't by any chance buying it?' I laughed.
+
+'No,' he said. 'A Johnny at Utrecht is issuing a facsimile of it,
+with all the hundred odd miniatures in colour. It will be the
+finest thing in reproduction ever done. Only seventy-five copies
+for England.'
+
+'How much?' I asked.
+
+'Well,' said he, with a preliminary look at his wife,'thirty-three
+pounds.'
+
+'Thirty-three POUNDS!' she screamed. 'You never told me.'
+
+'My wife never will understand,' said Mr Brindley, 'that complete
+confidence between two human beings is impossible.'
+
+'I shall go out as a milliner, that's all,' Mrs Brindley returned.
+'Remember, the Dictionary of National Biography isn't paid for
+yet.'
+
+'I'm glad I forgot that, otherwise I shouldn't have ordered the
+Hortulus.'
+
+'You've not ORDERED it?'
+
+'Yes, I have. It'll be here tomorrow--at least the first part
+will.'
+
+Mrs Brindley affected to fall back dying in her chair.
+
+'Quite mad!' she complained to me. 'Quite mad. It's a hopeless
+case.'
+
+But obviously she was very proud of the incurable lunatic.
+
+'But you're a book-collector!' I exclaimed, so struck by these
+feats of extravagance in a modest house that I did not conceal my
+amazement.
+
+'Did you think I collected postage-stamps?' the husband retorted.
+'No, _I_'m not a book-collector, but our doctor is. He has a few
+books, if you like. Still, I wouldn't swop him; he's much too fond
+of fashionable novels.'
+
+'You know you're always up his place,' said the wife; 'and I
+wonder what _I_ should do if it wasn't for the doctor's novels!'
+The doctor was evidently a favourite of hers.
+
+'I'm not always up at his place,' the husband contradicted. 'You
+know perfectly well I never go there before midnight. And HE knows
+perfectly well that I only go because he has the best whisky in
+the town. By the way, I wonder whether he knows that Simon Fuge is
+dead. He's got one of his etchings. I'll go up.'
+
+'Who's Simon Fuge?' asked Mrs Brindley.
+
+'Don't you remember old Fuge that kept the Blue Bell at Cauldon?'
+
+'What? Simple Simon?'
+
+'Yes. Well, his son.'
+
+'Oh! I remember. He ran away from home once, didn't he, and his
+mother had a port-wine stain on her left cheek? Oh, of course. I
+remember him perfectly. He came down to the Five Towns some years
+ago for his aunt's funeral. So he's dead. Who told you?'
+
+'Mr Loring.'
+
+'Did you know him?' she glanced at me.
+
+'I scarcely knew him,' said I. 'I saw it in the paper.'
+
+'What, the Signal?'
+
+'The Signal's the local rag,' Mr Brindley interpolated. 'No. It's
+in the Gazette.'
+
+'The Birmingham Gazette?'
+
+'No, bright creature--the Gazette,' said Mr Brindley.
+
+'Oh!' She seemed puzzled.
+
+'Didn't you know he was a painter?' the husband condescendingly
+catechized.
+
+'I knew he used to teach at the Hanbridge School of Art,' said Mrs
+Brindley stoutly. 'Mother wouldn't let me go there because of
+that. Then he got the sack.'
+
+'Poor defenceless thing! How old were you?'
+
+'Seventeen, I expect.'
+
+'I'm much obliged to your mother.'
+
+'Where did he die?' Mrs Brindley demanded.
+
+'At San Remo,' I answered. 'Seems queer him dying at San Remo in
+September, doesn't it?'
+
+'Why?'
+
+'San Remo is a winter place. No one ever goes there before
+December.'
+
+'Oh, is it?' the lady murmured negligently. 'Then that would be
+just like Simon Fuge. _I_ was never afraid of him,' she added, in
+a defiant tone, and with a delicious inconsequence that choked her
+husband in the midst of a draught of beer.
+
+'You can laugh,' she said sturdily.
+
+At that moment there was heard a series of loud explosive sounds
+in the street. They continued for a few seconds apparently just
+outside the dining-room window. Then they stopped, and the noise
+of the bumping electric cars resumed its sway over the ear.
+
+'That's Oliver!' said Mr Brindley, looking at his watch. 'He must
+have come from Manchester in an hour and a half. He's a terror.'
+
+'Glass! Quick!' Mrs Brindley exclaimed. She sprang to the
+sideboard, and seized a tumbler, which Mr Brindley filled from a
+second bottle of Bass. When the door of the room opened she was
+standing close to it, laughing, with the full, frothing glass in
+her hand.
+
+A tall, thin man, rather younger than Mr Brindley and his wife,
+entered. He wore a long dust-coat and leggings, and he carried a
+motorist's cap in a great hand. No one spoke; but little puffs of
+laughter escaped all Mrs Brindley's efforts to imprison her mirth.
+Then the visitor took the glass with a magnificent broad smile,
+and said, in a rich and heavy Midland voice--
+
+'Here's to moy wife's husband!'
+
+And drained the nectar.
+
+'Feel better now, don't you?' Mrs Brindley inquired.
+
+'Aye, Mrs Bob, I do!' was the reply. 'How do, Bob?'
+
+'How do?' responded my host laconically. And then with gravity:
+'Mr Loring--Mr Oliver Colclough--thinks he knows something about
+music.'
+
+'Glad to meet you, sir,' said Mr Colclough, shaking hands with me.
+He had a most attractively candid smile, but he was so long and
+lanky that he seemed to pervade the room like an omnipresence.
+
+'Sit down and have a bit of cheese, Oliver,' said Mrs Brindley, as
+she herself sat down.
+
+'No, thanks, Mrs Bob. I must be getting towards home.'
+
+He leaned on her chair.
+
+'Trifle, then?'
+
+'No, thanks.'
+
+'Machine going all right?'
+
+'Like oil. Never stopped th' engine once.'
+
+'Did you get the Sinfonia Domestica, Ol?' Mr Brindley inquired.
+
+'Didn't I say as I should get it, Bob?'
+
+'You SAID you would.'
+
+'Well, I've got it.'
+
+'In Manchester?'
+
+'Of course.'
+
+Mr Brindley's face shone with desire and Mr Oliver Colclough's
+face shone with triumph.
+
+'Where is it?'
+
+'In the hall.'
+
+'My hall?'
+
+'Aye!'
+
+'We'll play it, Ol.'
+
+'No, really, Bob! I can't stop now. I promised the wife--'
+
+'We'll PLAY it, Ol! You'd no business to make promises. Besides,
+suppose you'd had a puncture!'
+
+'I expect you've heard Strauss's Sinfonia Domestica, Mr Loring, up
+in the village?' Mr Colclough addressed me. He had surrendered to
+the stronger will.
+
+'In London?' I said. 'No. But I've heard of it.'
+
+'Bob and I heard it in Manchester last week, and we thought it 'ud
+be a bit of a lark to buy the arrangement for pianoforte duet.'
+
+'Come and listen to it,' said Mr Brindley. 'That is, if nobody
+wants any more beer.'
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The drawing-room was about twice as large as the dining-room, and
+it contained about four times as much furniture. Once again there
+were books all round the walls. A grand piano, covered with music,
+stood in a corner, and behind was a cabinet full of bound music.
+
+Mr Brindley, seated on one corner of the bench in front of the
+piano, cut the leaves of the Sinfonia Domestica.
+
+'It's the devil!' he observed.
+
+'Aye, lad!' agreed Mr Colclough, standing over him. 'It's
+difficult.'
+
+'Come on,' said Mr. Brindley, when he had finished cutting.
+
+'Better take your dust-coat off, hadn't you?' Mrs Brindley
+suggested to the friend. She and I were side by side on a sofa at
+the other end of the room.
+
+'I may as well,' Mr Colclough admitted, and threw the long garment
+on to a chair. 'Look here, Bob, my hands are stiff with steering.'
+
+'Don't find fault with your tools,' said Mr Brindley; 'and sit
+down. No, my boy, I'm going to play the top part. Shove along.'
+
+'I want to play the top part because it's easiest,' Mr Colclough
+grumbled.
+
+'How often have I told you the top part is never easiest? Who do
+you suppose is going to keep this symphony together--you or me?'
+
+'Sorry I spoke.'
+
+They arranged themselves on the bench, and Mr Brindley turned up
+the lower corners of every alternate leaf of the music.
+
+'Now,' said he. 'Ready?'
+
+'Let her zip,' said Mr Colclough.
+
+They began to play. And then the door opened, and a servant, whose
+white apron was starched as stiff as cardboard, came in carrying a
+tray of coffee and unholy liqueurs, which she deposited with a
+rattle on a small table near the hostess.
+
+'Curse!' muttered Mr Brindley, and stopped.
+
+'Life's very complex, ain't it, Bob?' Mr Colclough murmured.
+
+'Aye, lad.' The host glanced round to make sure that the rattling
+servant had entirely gone. 'Now start again.'
+
+'Wait a minute, wait a minute!' cried Mrs Brindley excitedly. 'I'm
+just pouring out Mr Loring's coffee. There!' As she handed me the
+cup she whispered, 'We daren't talk. It's more than our place is
+worth.'
+
+The performance of the symphony proceeded. To me, who am not a
+performer, it sounded excessively brilliant and incomprehensible.
+Mr Colclough stretched his right hand to turn over the page, and
+fumbled it. Another stoppage.
+
+'Damn you, Ol!' Mr Brindley exploded. 'I wish you wouldn't make
+yourself so confoundedly busy. Leave the turning to me. It takes a
+great artist to turn over, and you're only a blooming chauffeur.
+We'll begin again.'
+
+'Sackcloth!' Mr Colclough whispered.
+
+I could not estimate the length of the symphony; but my impression
+was one of extreme length. Halfway through it the players both
+took their coats off. There was no other surcease.
+
+'What dost think of it, Bob?' asked Mr Colclough in the weird
+silence that reigned after they had finished. They were standing
+up and putting on their coats and wiping their faces.
+
+'I think what I thought before,' said Mr Brindley. 'It's
+childish.'
+
+'It isn't childish,' the other protested. 'It's ugly, but it isn't
+childish.'
+
+'It's childishly clever,' Mr Brindley modified his description. He
+did not ask my opinion.
+
+'Coffee's cold,' said Mrs Brindley.
+
+'I don't want any coffee. Give me some Chartreuse, please. Have a
+drop o' green, Ol?'
+
+'A split soda 'ud be more in my line. Besides, I'm just going to
+have my supper. Never mind, I'll have a drop, missis, and chance
+it. I've never tried Chartreuse as an appetizer.'
+
+At this point commenced a sanguinary conflict of wills to settle
+whether or not I also should indulge in green Chartreuse. I was
+defeated. Besides the Chartreuse, I accepted a cigar. Never before
+or since have I been such a buck.
+
+'I must hook it,' said Mr Colclough, picking up his dust-coat.
+
+'Not yet you don't,' said Mr Brindley. 'I've got to get the taste
+of that infernal Strauss out of my mouth. We'll play the first
+movement of the G minor? La-la-la--la-la-la--la-la-la-ta.' He
+whistled a phrase.
+
+Mr Colclough obediently sat down again to the piano.
+
+The Mozart was like an idyll after a farcical melodrama. They
+played it with an astounding delicacy. Through the latter half of
+the movement I could hear Mr Brindley breathing regularly and
+heavily through his nose, exactly as though he were being
+hypnotized. I had a tickling sensation in the small of my back, a
+sure sign of emotion in me. The atmosphere was changed.
+
+'What a heavenly thing!' I exclaimed enthusiastically, when they
+had finished.
+
+Mr Brindley looked at me sharply, and just nodded in silence.
+Well, good night, Ol.'
+
+'I say,' said Mr Colclough; 'if you've nothing doing later on,
+bring Mr Loring round to my place. Will you come, Mr Loring? Do!
+Us'll have a drink.'
+
+These Five Towns people certainly had a simple, sincere way of
+offering hospitality that was quite irresistible. One could see
+that hospitality was among their chief and keenest pleasures.
+
+We all went to the front door to see Mr Colclough depart homewards
+in his automobile. The two great acetylene head-lights sent long
+glaring shafts of light down the side street. Mr Colclough,
+throwing the score of the Sinfonia Domestica into the tonneau of
+the immense car, put on a pair of gloves and began to circulate
+round the machine, tapping here, screwing there, as chauffeurs
+will. Then he bent down in front to start the engine.
+
+'By the way, Ol,' Mr Brindley shouted from the doorway, 'it seems
+Simon Fuge is dead.'
+
+We could see the man's stooping form between the two head-lights.
+He turned his head towards the house.
+
+'Who the dagger is Simon Fuge?' he inquired. 'There's about five
+thousand Fuges in th' Five Towns.'
+
+'Oh! I thought you knew him.'
+
+'I might, and I mightn't. It's not one o' them Fuge brothers
+saggar-makers at Longshaw, is it?'
+
+'No, It's--'
+
+Mr Colclough had succeeded in starting his engine, and the air was
+rent with gun-shots. He jumped lightly into the driver's seat.
+
+'Well, see you later,' he cried, and was off, persuading the
+enormous beast under him to describe a semicircle in the narrow
+street backing, forcing forward, and backing again, to the
+accompaniment of the continuous fusillade. At length he got away,
+drew up within two feet of an electric tram that slid bumping down
+the main street, and vanished round the corner. A little ragged
+boy passed, crying, 'Signal, extra,' and Mr Brindley hailed him.
+
+'What IS Mr Colclough?' I asked in the drawing-room.
+
+'Manufacturer--sanitary ware,' said Mr Brindley. 'He's got one of
+the best businesses in Hanbridge. I wish I'd half his income.
+Never buys a book, you know.'
+
+'He seems to play the piano very well.'
+
+'Well, as to that, he doesn't what you may call PLAY, but he's the
+best sight-reader in this district, bar me. I never met his equal.
+When you come across any one who can read a thing like the
+Domestic Symphony right off and never miss his place, you might
+send me a telegram. Colclough's got a Steinway. Wish I had.'
+
+Mrs Brindley had been looking through the Signal.
+
+'I don't see anything about Simon Fuge here,' said she.
+
+'Oh, nonsense!' said her husband. 'Buchanan's sure to have got
+something in about it. Let's look.'
+
+He received the paper from his wife, but failed to discover in it
+a word concerning the death of Simon Fuge.
+
+'Dashed if I don't ring Buchanan up and ask him what he means!
+Here's a paper with an absolute monopoly in the district, and
+brings in about five thousand a year clear to somebody, and it
+doesn't give the news! There never is anything but advertisements
+and sporting results in the blessed thing.'
+
+He rushed to his telephone, which was in the hall. Or rather, he
+did not rush; he went extremely quickly, with aggressive footsteps
+that seemed to symbolize just retribution. We could hear him at
+the telephone.
+
+'Hello! No. Yes. Is that you, Buchanan? Well, I want Mr Buchanan.
+Is that you, Buchanan? Yes, I'm all right. What in thunder do you
+mean by having nothing in tonight about Simon Fuge's death? Eh?
+Yes, the Gazette. Well, I suppose you aren't Scotch for nothing.
+Why the devil couldn't you stop in Scotland and edit papers
+there?' Then a laugh. 'I see. Yes. What did you think of those
+cigars? Oh! See you at the dinner. Ta-ta.' A final ring.
+
+'The real truth is, he wanted some advice as to the tone of his
+obituary notice,' said Mr Brindley, coming back into the drawing-
+room. 'He's got it, seemingly. He says he's writing it now, for
+tomorrow. He didn't put in the mere news of the death, because it
+was exclusive to the Gazette, and he's been having some difficulty
+with the Gazette lately. As he says, tomorrow afternoon will be
+quite soon enough for the Five Towns. It isn't as if Simon Fuge
+was a cricket match. So now you see how the wheels go round, Mr
+Loring.'
+
+He sat down to the piano and began to play softly the Castle
+motive from the Nibelung's Ring. He kept repeating it in different
+keys.
+
+'What about the mumps, wife?' he asked Mrs Brindley, who had been
+out of the room and now returned.
+
+'Oh! I don't think it is mumps,' she replied. 'They're all
+asleep.'
+
+'Good!' he murmured, still playing the Castle motive.
+
+'Talking of Simon Fuge,' I said determined to satisfy my
+curiosity, 'who WERE the two sisters?'
+
+'What two sisters?'
+
+'That he spent the night in the boat with, on Ilam Lake.'
+
+'Was that in the Gazette? I didn't read all the article.'
+
+He changed abruptly into the Sword motive, which he gave with a
+violent flourish, and then he left the piano. 'I do beg you not to
+wake my children,' said his wife.
+
+'Your children must get used to my piano,' said he. 'Now, then,
+what about these two sisters?'
+
+I pulled the Gazette from my pocket and handed it to him. He read
+aloud the passage describing the magic night on the lake.
+
+'_I_ don't know who they were,' he said. 'Probably something tasty
+from the Hanbridge Empire.'
+
+We both observed a faint, amused smile on the face of Mrs
+Brindley, the smile of a woman who has suddenly discovered in her
+brain a piece of knowledge rare and piquant.
+
+'I can guess who they were,' she said. 'In fact, I'm sure.'
+
+'Who?'
+
+'Annie Brett and--you know who.'
+
+'What, down at the Tiger?'
+
+'Certainly. Hush!' Mrs Brindley ran to the door and, opening it,
+listened. The faint, fretful cry of a child reached us. 'There!
+You've done it! I told you you would!'
+
+She disappeared. Mr Brindley whistled.
+
+'And who is Annie Brett?' I inquired.
+
+'Look here,' said he, with a peculiar inflection. 'Would you like
+to see her?'
+
+'I should,' I said with decision.
+
+'Well, come on, then. We'll go down to the Tiger and have a drop
+of something.'
+
+'And the other sister?' I asked.
+
+'The other sister is Mrs Oliver Colclough,' he answered. 'Curious,
+ain't it?'
+
+Again there was that swift, scarcely perceptible phenomenon in his
+eyes.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+We stood at the corner of the side-street and the main road, and
+down the main road a vast, white rectangular cube of bright light
+came plunging--its head rising and dipping--at express speed, and
+with a formidable roar. Mr Brindley imperiously raised his stick;
+the extraordinary box of light stopped as if by a miracle, and we
+jumped into it, having splashed through mud, and it plunged off
+again--bump, bump, bump--into the town of Bursley. As Mr Brindley
+passed into the interior of the car, he said laconically to two
+men who were smoking on the platform--
+
+'How do, Jim? How do, Jo?'
+
+And they responded laconically--
+
+'How do, Bob?'
+
+'How do, Bob?'
+
+We sat down. Mr Brindley pointed to the condition of the floor.
+
+'Cheerful, isn't it?' he observed to me, shouting above the din of
+vibrating glass.
+
+Our fellow-passengers were few and unromantic, perhaps halfa-dozen
+altogether on the long, shiny, yellow seats of the car, each
+apparently lost in gloomy reverie.
+
+'It's the advertisements and notices in these cars that are the
+joy of the super-man like you and me,' shouted Mr Brindley. 'Look
+there, "Passengers are requested not to spit on the floor." Simply
+an encouragement to lie on the seats and spit on the ceiling,
+isn't it? "Wear only Noble's wonderful boots." Suppose we did!
+Unless they came well up above the waist we should be prosecuted.
+But there's no sense of humour in this district.'
+
+Greengrocers' shops and public-houses were now flying past the
+windows of the car. It began to climb a hill, and then halted.
+
+'Here we are!' ejaculated Mr Brindley.
+
+And he was out of the car almost before I had risen.
+
+We strolled along a quiet street, and came to a large building
+with many large lighted windows, evidently some result of public
+effort.
+
+'What's that place?' I demanded.
+
+'That's the Wedgwood Institution.'
+
+'Oh! So that's the Wedgwood Institution, is it?'
+
+'Yes. Commonly called the Wedgwood. Museum, reading-room, public
+library--dirtiest books in the world, I mean physically--art
+school, science school. I've never explained to you why I'm
+chairman of the Management Committee, have I? Well, it's because
+the Institution is meant to foster the arts, and I happen to know
+nothing about 'em. I needn't tell you that architecture,
+literature, and music are not arts within the meaning of the act.
+Not much! Like to come in and see the museum for a minute? You'll
+have to see it in your official capacity tomorrow.'
+
+We crossed the road, and entered an imposing portico. Just as we
+did so a thick stream of slouching men began to descend the steps,
+like a waterfall of treacle. Mr Brindley they appeared to see, but
+evidently I made no impression on their retinas. They bore down
+the steps, hands deep in pockets, sweeping over me like Fate. Even
+when I bounced off one of them to a lower step, he showed by no
+sign that the fact of my existence had reached his consciousness--
+simply bore irresistibly downwards. The crowd was absolutely
+silent. At last I gained the entrance hall.
+
+'It's closing-time for the reading room,' said Mr Brindley.
+
+'I'm glad I survived it,' I said.
+
+'The truth is,' said he, 'that people who can't look after
+themselves don't flourish in these latitudes. But you'll be
+acclimatized by tomorrow. See that?'
+
+He pointed to an alabaster tablet on which was engraved a record
+of the historical certainty that Mr Gladstone opened the
+Institution in 1868, also an extract from the speech which he
+delivered on that occasion.
+
+'What do you THINK of Gladstone down here?' I demanded.
+
+'In my official capacity I think that these deathless words are
+the last utterance of wisdom on the subject of the influence of
+the liberal arts on life. And I should advise you, in your
+official capacity, to think the same, unless you happen to have a
+fancy for having your teeth knocked down your throat.'
+
+'I see,' I said, not sure how to take him.
+
+'Lest you should go away with the idea that you have been visiting
+a rude and barbaric people, I'd better explain that that was a
+joke. As a matter of fact, we're rather enlightened here. The only
+man who stands a chance of getting his teeth knocked down his
+throat here is the ingenious person who started the celebrated
+legend of the man-and-dog fight at Hanbridge. It's a long time
+ago, a very long time ago; but his grey hairs won't save him from
+horrible tortures if we catch him. We don't mind being called
+immoral, we're above a bit flattered when London newspapers come
+out with shocking details of debauchery in the Five Towns, but we
+pride ourselves on our manners. I say, Aked!' His voice rose
+commandingly, threateningly, to an old bent, spectacled man who
+was ascending a broad white staircase in front of us.
+
+'Sir!' The man turned.
+
+'Don't turn the lights out yet in the museum.'
+
+'No, sir! Are you coming up?' The accents were slow and tremulous.
+
+'Yes. I have a gentleman here from the British Museum who wants to
+look round.'
+
+The oldish man came deliberately down the steps, and approached
+us. Then his gaze, beginning at my waist, gradually rose to my
+hat.
+
+'From the British Museum?' he drawled. 'I'm sure I'm very glad to
+meet you, sir. I'm sure it's a very great honour.'
+
+He held out a wrinkled hand, which I shook.
+
+'Mr Aked,' said Mr Brindley, by way of introduction. 'Been
+caretaker here for pretty near forty years.'
+
+'Ever since it opened, sir,' said Aked.
+
+We went up the white stone stairway, rather a grandiose
+construction for a little industrial town. It divided itself into
+doubling curving flights at the first landing, and its walls were
+covered with pictures and designs. The museum itself, a series of
+three communicating rooms, was about as large as a pocket-
+handkerchief.
+
+'Quite small,' I said.
+
+I gave my impression candidly, because I had already judged Mr
+Brindley to be the rare and precious individual who is worthy of
+the high honour of frankness.
+
+'Do you think so?' he demanded quickly. I had shocked him, that
+was clear. His tone was unmistakable; it indicated an instinctive,
+involuntary protest. But he recovered himself in a flash. 'That's
+jealousy,' he laughed. 'All you British Museum people are the
+same.' Then he added, with an unsuccessful attempt to convince me
+that he meant what he was saying: 'Of course it is small. It's
+nothing, simply nothing.'
+
+Yes, I had unwittingly found the joint in the armour of this
+extraordinary Midland personage. With all his irony, with all his
+violent humour, with all his just and unprejudiced perceptions, he
+had a tenderness for the Institution of which he was the dictator.
+He loved it. He could laugh like a god at everything in the Five
+Towns except this one thing. He would try to force himself to
+regard even this with the same lofty detachment, but he could not
+do it naturally.
+
+I stopped at a case of Wedgwood ware, marked 'Perkins Collection.'
+
+'By Jove!' I exclaimed, pointing to a vase. 'What a body!'
+
+He was enchanted by my enthusiasm.
+
+'Funny you should have hit on that,' said he. 'Old Daddy Perkins
+always called it his ewe-lamb.'
+
+Thus spoken, the name of the greatest authority on Wedgwood ware
+that Europe has ever known curiously impressed me.
+
+'I suppose you knew him?' I questioned.
+
+'Considering that I was one of the pall-bearers at his funeral,
+and caught the champion cold of my life!'
+
+'What sort of a man was he?'
+
+'Outside Wedgwood ware he wasn't any sort of a man. He was that
+scourge of society, a philanthropist,' said Mr Brindley. 'He was
+an upright citizen, and two thousand people followed him to his
+grave. I'm an upright citizen, but I have no hope that two
+thousand people will follow me to my grave.'
+
+'You never know what may happen,' I observed, smiling.
+
+'No.' He shook his head. 'If you undermine the moral character of
+your fellow-citizens by a long course of unbridled miscellaneous
+philanthropy, you can have a funeral procession as long as you
+like, at the rate of about forty shillings a foot. But you'll
+never touch the great heart of the enlightened public of these
+boroughs in any other way. Do you imagine anyone cared a twopenny
+damn for Perkins's Wedgwood ware?'
+
+'It's like that everywhere,' I said.
+
+'I suppose it is,' he assented unwillingly.
+
+Who can tell what was passing in the breast of Mr Brindley? I
+could not. At least I could not tell with any precision. I could
+only gather, vaguely, that what he considered the wrong-
+headedness, the blindness, the lack of true perception, of his
+public was beginning to produce in his individuality a faint trace
+of permanent soreness. I regretted it. And I showed my sympathy
+with him by asking questions about the design and construction of
+the museum (a late addition to the Institution), of which I
+happened to know that he had been the architect.
+
+He at once became interested and interesting. Although he perhaps
+insisted a little too much on the difficulties which occur when
+original talent encounters stupidity, he did, as he walked me up
+and down, contrive to convey to me a notion of the creative
+processes of the architect in a way that was in my experience
+entirely novel. He was impressing me anew, and I was wondering
+whether he was unique of his kind or whether there existed
+regiments of him in this strange parcel of England.
+
+'Now, you see this girder,' he said, looking upwards.
+
+That's surely something of Fuge's, isn't it?' I asked, indicating
+a small picture in a corner, after he had finished his explanation
+of the functions of the girder.
+
+As on the walls of the staircase and corridors, so on the walls
+here, there were many paintings, drawings, and engravings. And of
+course the best were here in the museum. The least uninteresting
+items of the collection were, speaking generally, reproductions in
+monotint of celebrated works, and a few second--or third-rate loan
+pictures from South Kensington. Aside from such matters I had
+noticed nothing but the usual local trivialities, gifts from one
+citizen or another, travel-jottings of some art-master, careful
+daubs of apt students without a sense of humour. The aspect of the
+place was exactly the customary aspect of the small provincial
+museum, as I have seen it in half-a-hundred towns that are not
+among 'the great towns'. It had the terrible trite 'museum'
+aspect, the aspect that brings woe and desolation to the heart of
+the stoutest visitor, and which seems to form part of the
+purgatorio of Bank-holidays, wide mouths, and stiff clothes. The
+movement for opening museums on Sundays is the most natural
+movement that could be conceived. For if ever a resort was
+invented and fore-ordained to chime with the true spirit of the
+British sabbath, that resort is the average museum. I ought to
+know. I do know.
+
+But there was the incomparable Wedgwood ware, and there was the
+little picture by Simon Fuge. I am not going to lose my sense of
+perspective concerning Simon Fuge. He was not the greatest painter
+that ever lived, or even of his time. He had, I am ready to
+believe, very grave limitations. But he was a painter by himself,
+as all fine painters are. He had his own vision. He was Unique. He
+was exclusively preoccupied with the beauty and the romance of the
+authentic. The little picture showed all this. It was a painting,
+unfinished, of a girl standing at a door and evidently hesitating
+whether to open the door or not: a very young girl, very thin,
+with long legs in black stockings, and short, white, untidy frock;
+thin bare arms; the head thrown on one side, and the hands raised,
+and one foot raised, in a wonderful childish gesture--the gesture
+of an undecided fox-terrier. The face was an infant's face,
+utterly innocent; and yet Simon Fuge had somehow caught in that
+face a glimpse of all the future of the woman that the girl was to
+be, he had displayed with exquisite insolence the essential
+naughtiness of his vision of things. The thing was not much more
+than a sketch; it was a happy accident, perhaps, in some day's
+work of Simon Fuge's. But it was genius. When once you had yielded
+to it, there was no other picture in the room. It killed
+everything else. But, wherever it had found itself, nothing could
+have killed IT. Its success was undeniable, indestructible. And it
+glowed sombrely there on the wall, a few splashes of colour on a
+morsel of canvas, and it was Simon Fuge's unconscious, proud
+challenge to the Five Towns. It WAS Simon Fuge, at any rate all of
+Simon Fuge that was worth having, masterful, imperishable. And not
+merely was it his challenge, it was his scorn, his aristocratic
+disdain, his positive assurance that in the battle between them he
+had annihilated the Five Towns. It hung there in the very midst
+thereof, calmly and contemptuously waiting for the acknowledgement
+of his victory.
+
+'Which?' said Mr Brindley.
+
+That one.'
+
+'Yes, I fancy it is,' he negligently agreed. 'Yes, it is.'
+
+'It's not signed,' I remarked.
+
+'It ought to be,' said Mr Brindley; then laughed, 'Too late now!'
+
+'How did it get here?'
+
+'Don't know. Oh! I think Mr Perkins won it in a raffle at a
+bazaar, and then hung it here. He did as he liked here, you know.'
+
+I was just going to become vocal in its praise, when Mr Brindley
+said--
+
+'That thing under it is a photograph of a drinking-cup for which
+one of our pupils won a national scholarship last year!'
+
+Mr Aked appeared in the distance.
+
+'I fancy the old boy wants to be off to bed,' Mr Brindley
+whispered kindly.
+
+So we left the Wedgwood Institution. I began to talk to Mr
+Brindley about music. The barbaric attitude of the Five Towns
+towards great music was the theme of some very lively
+animadversions on his part.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+The Tiger was very conveniently close to the Wedgwood Institution.
+The Tiger had a 'yard', one of those long, shapeless expanses of
+the planet, partly paved with uneven cobbles and partly
+unsophisticated planet, without which no provincial hotel can call
+itself respectable. We came into it from the hinterland through a
+wooden doorway in a brick wall. Far off I could see one light
+burning. We were in the centre of Bursley, the gold angel of its
+Town Hall rose handsomely over the roof of the hotel in the
+diffused moonlight, but we might have been in the purlieus of some
+dubious establishment on the confines of a great seaport, where
+anything may happen. The yard was so deserted, so mysterious, so
+shut in, so silent, that, really, infamous characters ought to
+have rushed out at us from the obscurity of shadows, and felled us
+to the earth with no other attendant phenomenon than a low groan.
+There are places where one seems to feel how thin and brittle is
+the crust of law and order. Why one should be conscious of this in
+the precincts of such a house as the Tiger, which I was given to
+understand is as respectable as the parish church, I do not know.
+But I have experienced a similar feeling in the yards of other
+provincial hotels that were also as correct as parish churches. We
+passed a dim fly, with its shafts slanting forlornly to the
+ground, and a wheelbarrow. Both looked as though they had been
+abandoned for ever. Then we came to the lamp, which illuminated a
+door, and on the door was a notice: 'Private Bar. Billiards.'
+
+I am not a frequenter of convivial haunts. I should not dare to
+penetrate alone into a private bar; when I do enter a private bar
+it is invariably under the august protection of an habitue, and it
+is invariably with the idea that at last I am going to see life.
+Often has this illusion been shattered, but each time it perfectly
+renewed itself. So I followed the bold Mr Brindley into the
+private bar of the Tiger.
+
+It was a small and low room. I instinctively stooped, though there
+was no necessity for me to stoop. The bar had no peculiarity. It
+can be described in a breath: Three perpendicular planes. Back
+plane, bottles arranged exactly like books on bookshelves; middle
+plane, the upper halves of two women dressed in tight black; front
+plane, a counter, dotted with glasses, and having strange areas of
+zinc. Reckon all that as the stage, and the rest of the room as
+auditorium. But the stage of a private bar is more mysterious than
+the stage of a theatre. You are closer to it, and yet it is far
+less approachable. The edge of the counter is more sacred than the
+footlights. Impossible to imagine yourself leaping over it.
+Impossible to imagine yourself in that cloistered place behind it.
+Impossible to imagine how the priestesses got themselves into that
+place, or that they ever leave it. They are always there; they are
+always the same. You may go into a theatre when it is empty and
+dark; but did you ever go into a private bar that was empty and
+dark? A private bar is as eternal as the hills, as changeless as
+the monomania of a madman, as mysterious as sorcery. Always the
+same order of bottles, the same tinkling, the same popping, the
+same time-tables, and the same realistic pictures of frothing
+champagne on the walls, the same advertisements on the same ash-
+trays on the counter, the same odour that wipes your face like a
+towel the instant you enter; and the same smiles, the same
+gestures, the same black fabric stretched to tension over the same
+impressive mammiferous phenomena of the same inexplicable
+creatures who apparently never eat and never sleep, imprisoned for
+life in the hallowed and mystic hollow between the bottles and the
+zinc.
+
+In a tone almost inaudible in its discretion, Mr Brindley let fall
+to me as he went in--
+
+This is she.'
+
+She was not quite the ordinary barmaid. Nor, as I learnt
+afterwards, was she considered to be the ordinary barmaid. She was
+something midway in importance between the wife of the new
+proprietor and the younger woman who stood beside her in the
+cloister talking to a being that resembled a commercial traveller.
+It was the younger woman who was the ordinary barmaid; she had
+bright hair, and the bright vacant stupidity which, in my narrow
+experience, barmaids so often catch like an infectious disease
+from their clients. But Annie Brett was different. I can best
+explain how she impressed me by saying that she had the mien of a
+handsome married woman of forty with a coquettish and
+superficially emotional past, but also with a daughter who is just
+going into long skirts. I have known one or two such women. They
+have been beautiful; they are still handsome at a distance of
+twelve feet. They are rather effusive; they think they know life,
+when as a fact their instinctive repugnance for any form of truth
+has prevented them from acquiring even the rudiments of the
+knowledge of life. They are secretly preoccupied by the burning
+question of obesity. They flatter, and they will pay any price for
+flattery. They are never sincere, not even with themselves; they
+never, during the whole of their existence, utter a sincere word,
+even in anger they coldly exaggerate. They are always frothing at
+the mouth with ecstasy. They adore everything, including God; go
+to church carrying a prayer-book and hymn-book in separate
+volumes, and absolutely fawn on the daughter. They are stylish--
+and impenetrable. But there is something about them very wistful
+and tragic.
+
+In another social stratum, Miss Annie Brett might have been such a
+woman. Without doubt nature had intended her for the role. She
+was just a little ample, with broad shoulders and a large head and
+a lot of dark chestnut hair; a large mouth, and large teeth. She
+had earrings, a brooch, and several rings; also a neat originality
+of cuffs that would not have been permitted to an ordinary
+barmaid. As for her face, there were crow's-feet, and a mole
+(which had selected with infinite skill a site on her chin), and a
+general degeneracy of complexion; but it was an effective face.
+The little thing of twenty-three or so by her side had all the
+cruel advantages of youth and was not ugly; but she was 'killed'
+by Annie Brett. Miss Brett had a maternal bust. Indeed, something
+of the maternal resided in all of her that was visible above the
+zinc. She must have been about forty; that is to say, apparently
+older than the late Simon Fuge. Nevertheless, I could conceive
+her, even now, speciously picturesque in a boat at midnight on a
+moonstruck water. Had she been on the stage she would have been
+looking forward to ingenue parts for another five years yet--such
+was her durable sort of effectiveness. Yes, she indubitably
+belonged to the ornamental half of the universe.
+
+'So this is one of them!' I said to myself.
+
+I tried to be philosophical; but at heart I was profoundly
+disappointed. I did not know what I had expected; but I had not
+expected THAT. I was well aware that a thing written always takes
+on a quality which does not justly appertain to it. I had not
+expected, therefore, to see an odalisque, a houri, an ideal toy or
+the remains of an ideal toy; I had not expected any kind of
+obvious brilliancy, nor a subtle charm that would haunt my memory
+for evermore. On the other hand, I had not expected the banal, the
+perfectly commonplace. And I think that Miss Annie Brett was the
+most banal person that it has pleased Fate to send into my life. I
+knew that instantly. She was a condemnation of Simon Fuge. SHE,
+one of the 'wonderful creatures who had played so large a part' in
+the career of Simon Fuge! Sapristi! Still, she WAS one of the
+wonderful creatures, etc. She HAD floated o'er the bosom of the
+lake with a great artist. She HAD received his homage. She HAD
+stirred his feelings. She HAD shared with him the magic of the
+night. I might decry her as I would; she had known how to cast a
+spell over him--she and the other one! Something there in her
+which had captured him and, seemingly, held him captive.
+
+'Good-EVENING, Mr Brindley,' she expanded. 'You're quite a
+stranger.' And she embraced me also in the largeness of her
+welcome.
+
+'It just happens,' said Mr Brindley, 'that I was here last night.
+But you weren't.'
+
+'Were you now!' she exclaimed, as though learning a novel fact of
+the most passionate interest. The truth is, I had to leave the bar
+to Miss Slaney last night. Mrs Moorcroft was ill--and the baby
+only six weeks old, you know--and I wouldn't leave her. No, I
+wouldn't.'
+
+It was plain that in Miss Annie Brett's opinion there was only one
+really capable intelligence in the Tiger. This glimpse of her
+capability, this out-leaping of the latent maternal in her,
+completely destroyed for the moment my vision of her afloat on the
+bosom of the lake.
+
+'I see,' said Mr Brindley kindly. Then he turned to me with
+characteristic abruptness. 'Well, give it a name, Mr Loring.'
+
+Such is my simplicity that I did not immediately comprehend his
+meaning. For a fraction of a second I thought of the baby. Then I
+perceived that he was merely employing one of the sacred phrases,
+sanctified by centuries of usage, of the private bar. I had
+already drunk mercurey, green Chartreuse, and coffee. I had a
+violent desire not to drink anything more. I knew my deplorable
+tomorrows. Still, I would have drunk hot milk, cold water, soda
+water, or tea. Why should I not have had what I did not object to
+having? Herein lies another mystery of the private bar. One could
+surely order tea or milk or soda water from a woman who left
+everything to tend a mother with a six-weeks-old baby! But no. One
+could not. As Miss Annie Brett smiled at me pointedly, and rubbed
+her ringed hands, and kept on smiling with her terrific mechanical
+effusiveness, I lost all my self control; I would have resigned
+myself to a hundred horrible tomorrows under the omnipotent,
+inexplicable influence of the private bar. I ejaculated, as though
+to the manner born--
+
+'Irish.'
+
+It proved to have been rather clever of me, showing as it did a
+due regard for convention combined with a pretty idiosyncrasy. Mr
+Brindley was clearly taken aback. The idea struck him as a new
+one. He reflected, and then enthusiastically exclaimed--
+
+'Dashed if I don't have Irish too!'
+
+And Miss Brett, delighted by this unexpected note of Irish in the
+long, long symphony of Scotch, charged our glasses with gusto. I
+sipped, death in my heart, and rakishness in my face and gesture.
+Mr Brindley raised his glass respectfully to Miss Annie Brett, and
+I did the same. Those two were evidently good friends.
+
+She led the conversation with hard, accustomed ease. When I say
+'hard' I do not in the least mean unsympathetic. But her
+sympathetic quality was toughened by excessive usage, like the
+hand of a charwoman. She spoke of the vagaries of the Town Hall
+clock, the health of Mr Brindley's children, the price of coal,
+the incidence of the annual wakes, the bankruptcy of the draper
+next door, and her own sciatica, all in the same tone of metallic
+tender solicitude. Mr Brindley adopted an entirely serious
+attitude towards her. If I had met him there and nowhere else I
+should have taken him for a dignified mediocrity, little better
+than a fool, but with just enough discretion not to give himself
+away. I said nothing. I was shy. I always am shy in a bar. Out of
+her cold, cold roving eye Miss Brett watched me, trying to add me
+up and not succeeding. She must have perceived, however, that I
+was not like a fish in water.
+
+There was a pause in the talk, due, I think, to Miss Annie Brett's
+preoccupation with what was going on between Miss Slaney, the
+ordinary barmaid, and her commercial traveller. The commercial
+traveller, if he was one, was reading something from a newspaper
+to Miss Slaney in an indistinct murmur, and with laughter in his
+voice.
+
+'By the way,' said Mr Brindley, 'you used to know Simon Fuge,
+didn't you?'
+
+'Old Simon Fuge!' said Miss Brett. 'Yes; after the brewery company
+took the Blue Bell at Cauldon over from him, I used to be there.
+He would come in sometimes. Such a nice queer old man!'
+
+'I mean the son,' said Mr Brindley.
+
+'Oh yes,' she answered. 'I knew young Mr Simon too.' A slight
+hesitation, and then: 'Of course!' Another hesitation. 'Why?'
+
+'Nothing,' said Mr Brindley. 'Only he's dead.'
+
+'You don't mean to say he's dead?' she exclaimed.
+
+'Day before yesterday, in Italy,' said Mr Brindley ruthlessly.
+
+Miss Annie Brett's manner certainly changed. It seemed almost to
+become natural and unecstatic.
+
+'I suppose it will be in the papers?' she ventured.
+
+'It's in the London paper.'
+
+'Well I never!' she muttered.
+
+'A long time, I should think, since he was in this part of the
+world,' said Mr Brindley. 'When did YOU last see him?'
+
+He was exceedingly skilful, I considered.
+
+She put the back of her hand over her mouth, and bending her head
+slightly and lowering her eyelids, gazed reflectively at the
+counter.
+
+'It was once when a lot of us went to Ilam,' she answered quietly.
+'The St Luke's lot, YOU know.'
+
+'Oh!' cried Mr Brindley, apparently startled. 'The St Luke's lot?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'How came he to go with you?'
+
+'He didn't go with us. He was there--stopping there, I suppose.'
+
+'Why, I believe I remember hearing something about that,' said Mr
+Brindley cunningly. 'Didn't he take you out in a boat?'
+
+A very faint dark crimson spread over the face of Miss Annie
+Brett. It could not be called a blush, but it was as like a blush
+as was possible to her. The phenomenon, as I could see from his
+eyes, gave Mr Brindley another shock.
+
+'Yes,' she replied. 'Sally was there as well.'
+
+Then a silence, during which the commercial traveller could be
+heard reading from the newspaper.
+
+'When was that?' gently asked Mr Brindley.
+
+'Don't ask ME when it was, Mr Brindley,' she answered nervously.
+'It's ever so long ago. What did he die of?'
+
+'Don't know.'
+
+Miss Annie Brett opened her mouth to speak, and did not speak.
+There were tears in her reddened eyes. I felt very awkward, and I
+think that Mr Brindley also felt awkward. But I was glad. Those
+moist eyes caused me a thrill. There was after all some humanity
+in Miss Annie Brett. Yes, she had after all floated on the bosom
+of the lake with Simon Fuge. The least romantic of persons, she
+had yet felt romance. If she had touched Simon Fuge, Simon Fuge
+had touched her. She had memories. Once she had lived. I pictured
+her younger. I sought in her face the soft remains of
+youthfulness. I invented languishing poses for her in the boat. My
+imagination was equal to the task of seeing her as Simon Fuge saw
+her. I did so see her. I recalled Simon Fuge's excited description
+of the long night in the boat, and I could reconstitute the night
+from end to end. And there the identical creature stood before me,
+the creature who had set fire to Simon Fuge, one of the 'wonderful
+creatures' of the Gazette, ageing, hardened, banal, but
+momentarily restored to the empire of romance by those unshed,
+glittering tears. As an experience it was worth having.
+
+She could not speak, and we did not. I heard the commercial
+traveller reading: '"The motion was therefore carried by twenty-
+five votes to nineteen, and the Countess of Chell promised that
+the whole question of the employment of barmaids should be raised
+at the next meeting of the B.W.T.S." There! what do you think of
+that?'
+
+Miss Annie Brett moved quickly towards the commercial traveller.
+
+Til tell you what _I_ think of it,' she said, with ecstatic
+resentment. 'I think it's just shameful! Why should the Countess
+of Chell want to rob a lot of respectable young ladies of their
+living? I can tell you they're just as respectable as the Countess
+of Chell is--yes, and perhaps more, by all accounts. I think
+people do well to call her "Interfering Iris". When she's robbed
+them of their living, what does she expect them to do? Is she
+going to keep them? Then what does she expect them to do?'
+
+The commercial traveller was inept enough to offer a jocular
+reply, and then he found himself involved in the morass of 'the
+whole question'. He, and we also, were obliged to hear in immense
+detail Miss Annie Brett's complete notions of the movement for the
+abolition of barmaids. The subject was heavy on her mind, and she
+lifted it off. Simon Fuge was relinquished; he dropped like a
+stone into the pool of forgetfulness. And yet, strange as it
+seems, she was assuredly not sincere in the expression of her
+views on the question of barmaids. She held no real views. She
+merely persuaded herself that she held them. When the commercial
+traveller, who was devoid of sense, pointed out that it was not
+proposed to rob anybody of a livelihood, and that existent
+barmaids would be permitted to continue to grace the counters of
+their adoption, she grew frostily vicious. The commercial
+traveller decided to retire and play billiards. Mr Brindley and I
+in our turn departed. I was extremely disappointed by this sequel.
+
+'Ah!' breathed Mr Brindley when we were outside, in front of the
+Town Hall. 'She was quite right about that clock.'
+
+After that we turned silently into a long illuminated street which
+rose gently. The boxes of light were flashing up and down it, but
+otherwise it seemed to be quite deserted. Mr Brindley filled a
+pipe and lit it as he walked. The way in which that man kept the
+match alight in a fresh breeze made me envious. I could conceive
+myself rivalling his exploits in cigarette-making, the purchase of
+rare books, the interpretation of music, even (for a wager) the
+drinking of beer, but I knew that I should never be able to keep a
+match alight in a breeze. He threw the match into the mud, and in
+the mud it continued miraculously to burn with a large flame, as
+though still under his magic dominion. There are some things that
+baffle the reasoning faculty. 'Well,' I said, 'she must have been
+a pretty woman once.'
+
+'"Pretty," by God!' he replied, 'she was beautiful. She was
+considered the finest piece in Hanbridge at one time. And let me
+tell you we're supposed to have more than our share of good looks
+in the Five Towns.'
+
+'What--the women, you mean?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'And she never married?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Nor--anything?'
+
+'Oh no,' he said carelessly.
+
+'But you don't mean to tell me she's never--' I was just going to
+exclaim, but I did not, I said: 'And it's her sister who is Mrs
+Colclough?'
+
+'Yes.' He seemed to be either meditative or disinclined to talk.
+However, my friends have sometimes hinted to me that when my
+curiosity is really aroused, I am capable of indiscretions.
+
+'So one sister rattles about in an expensive motor-car, and the
+other serves behind a bar!' I observed.
+
+He glanced at me.
+
+'I expect it's a bit difficult for you to understand,' he
+answered; 'but you must remember you're in a democratic district.
+You told me once you knew Exeter. Well, this isn't a cathedral
+town. It's about a century in front of any cathedral town in the
+world. Why, my good sir, there's practically no such thing as
+class distinction here. Both my grandfathers were working potters.
+Colclough's father was a joiner who finished up as a builder. If
+Colclough makes money and chooses to go to Paris and get the best
+motor-car he can, why in Hades shouldn't his wife ride in it? If
+he is fond of music and can play like the devil, that isn't his
+sister-in-law's fault, is it? His wife was a dressmaker, at least
+she was a dressmaker's assistant. If she suits him, what's the
+matter?'
+
+'But I never suggested--'
+
+'Excuse me,' he stopped me, speaking with careful and slightly
+exaggerated calmness, 'I think you did. If the difference in the
+situations of the two sisters didn't strike you as very
+extraordinary, what did you mean?'
+
+'And isn't it extraordinary?' I demanded.
+
+'It wouldn't be considered so in any reasonable society,' he
+insisted. 'The fact is, my good sir, you haven't yet quite got rid
+of Exeter. I do believe this place will do you good. Why, damn it!
+Colclough didn't marry both sisters. You think he might keep the
+other sister? Well, he might. But suppose his wife had half-a-
+dozen sisters, should he keep them all! I can tell you we're just
+like the rest of the world, we find no difficulty whatever in
+spending all the money we make. I dare say Colclough would be
+ready enough to keep his sister-in-law. I've never asked him. But
+I'm perfectly certain that his sister-in-law wouldn't be kept. Not
+much! You don't know these women down here, my good sir. She's
+earned her living at one thing or another all her life, and I
+reckon she'll keep on earning it till she drops. She is, without
+exception, the most exasperating female I ever came across, and
+that's saying something; but I will give her THAT credit: she's
+mighty independent.'
+
+'How exasperating?' I asked, surprised to hear this from him.
+
+'_I_ don't know. But she is. If she was my wife I should kill her
+one night. Don't you know what I mean?'
+
+'Yes, I quite agree with you,' I said. 'But you seemed to be
+awfully good friends with her.'
+
+'No use being anything else. No woman that it ever pleased
+Providence to construct is going to frighten me away from the
+draught Burton that you can get at the Tiger. Besides, she can't
+help it. She was born like that.'
+
+'She TALKS quite ordinarily,' I remarked.
+
+'Oh! It isn't what she says, particularly. It's HER. Either you
+like her or you don't like her. Now Colclough thinks she's all
+right. In fact, he admires her.'
+
+'There's one thing,' I said, 'she jolly nearly cried tonight.'
+
+'Purely mechanical!' said Mr Brindley with cruel curtness.
+
+What seemed to me singular was that the relations which had
+existed between Miss Annie Brett and Simon Fuge appeared to have
+no interest whatever for Mr Brindley. He had not even referred to
+them.
+
+'You were just beginning to draw her out,' I ventured.
+
+'No,' he replied; 'I thought I'd just see what she'd say. No one
+ever did draw that woman out.'
+
+I had completely lost my vision of her in the boat, but somehow
+that declaration of his, 'no one ever did draw that woman out',
+partially restored the vision to me. It seemed to invest her with
+agreeable mystery.
+
+'And the other sister--Mrs Colclough?' I questioned.
+
+'I'm taking you to see her as fast as I can,' he answered. His
+tone implied further: 'I've just humoured one of your whims, now
+for the other.'
+
+'But tell me something about her.'
+
+'She's the best bridge-player--woman, that is--in Bursley. But she
+will only play every other night for fear the habit should get
+hold of her. There you've got her.'
+
+'Younger than Miss Brett?'
+
+'Younger,' said Mr Brindley. 'She isn't the same sort of person,
+is she?'
+
+'She is not,' said Mr Brindley. And his tone implied: 'Thank God
+for it!'
+
+Very soon afterwards, at the top of a hill, he drew me into the
+garden of a large house which stood back from the road.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+It was quite a different sort of house from Mr Brindley's. One
+felt that immediately on entering the hall, which was extensive.
+There was far more money and considerably less taste at large in
+that house than in the other. I noticed carved furniture that must
+have been bought with a coarse and a generous hand; and on the
+walls a diptych by Marcus Stone portraying the course of true love
+clingingly draped. It was just like Exeter or Onslow Square. But
+the middle-aged servant who received us struck at once the same
+note as had sounded so agreeably at Mr Brindley's. She seemed
+positively glad to see us; our arrival seemed to afford her a
+peculiar and violent pleasure, as though the hospitality which we
+were about to accept was in some degree hers too. She robbed us of
+our hats with ecstasy.
+
+Then Mr Colclough appeared.
+
+'Delighted you've come, Mr Loring!' he said, shaking my hand
+again. He said it with fervour. He obviously was delighted. The
+exercise of hospitality was clearly the chief joy of his life; at
+least, if he had a greater it must have been something where
+keenness was excessive beyond the point of pleasure, as some joys
+are. 'How do, Bob? Your missis has just come.' He was still in his
+motoring clothes.
+
+Mr Brindley, observing my gaze transiently on the Marcus Stones,
+said: 'I know what you're looking for; you're looking for "Saul's
+Soul's Awakening". We don't keep it in the window; you'll see it
+inside.'
+
+'Bob's always rotting me about my pictures,' Mr Colclough smiled
+indulgently. He seemed big enough to eat his friend, and his rich,
+heavy voice rolled like thunder about the hall. 'Come along in,
+will you?'
+
+'Half-a-second, Ol,' Mr Brindley called in a conspiratorial tone,
+and, turning to me: Tell him THE Limerick. You know.'
+
+'The one about the hayrick?'
+
+Mr Brindley nodded.
+
+There were three heads close together for a space of twenty
+seconds or so, and then a fearful explosion happened--the unique,
+tremendous laughter of Mr Colclough, which went off like a charge
+of melinite and staggered the furniture.
+
+'Now, now!' a feminine voice protested from an unseen interior.
+
+I was taken to the drawing-room, an immense apartment with an
+immense piano black as midnight in it. At the further end two
+women were seated close together in conversation, and I distinctly
+heard the name 'Fuge'. One of them was Mrs Brindley, in a hat. The
+other, a very big and stout woman, in an elaborate crimson garment
+that resembled a teagown, rose and came to meet me with extended
+hand.
+
+'My wife--Mr Loring,' said Mr Oliver Colclough.
+
+'So glad to meet you,' she said, beaming on me with all her
+husband's pleasure. 'Come and sit between Mrs Brindley and me,
+near the window, and keep us in order. Don't you find it very
+close? There are at least a hundred cats in the garden.'
+
+One instantly perceived that ceremonial stiffness could not exist
+in the same atmosphere with Mrs Oliver Colclough. During the whole
+time I spent in her house there was never the slightest pause in
+the conversation. Mrs Oliver Colclough prevented nobody from
+talking, but she would gladly use up every odd remnant of time
+that was not employed by others. No scrap was too small for her.
+
+'So this is the other one!' I said to myself. 'Well, give me this
+one!'
+
+Certainly there was a resemblance between the two, in the general
+formation of the face, and the shape of the shoulders; but it is
+astonishing that two sisters can differ as these did, with a
+profound and vital difference. In Mrs Colclough there was no
+coquetterie, no trace of that more-than-half-suspicious challenge
+to a man that one feels always in the type to which her sister
+belonged. The notorious battle of the sexes was assuredly carried
+on by her in a spirit of frank muscular gaiety--she could, I am
+sure, do her share of fighting. Put her in a boat on the bosom of
+the lake under starlight, and she would not by a gesture, a tone,
+a glance, convey mysterious nothings to you, a male. She would not
+be subtly changed by the sensuous influences of the situation; she
+would always be the same plump and earthly piece of candour. Even
+if she were in love with you, she would not convey mysterious
+nothings in such circumstances. If she were in love with you she
+would most clearly convey unmysterious and solid somethings. I was
+convinced that the contributing cause to the presence of the late
+Simon Fuge in the boat on Ilam Lake on the historic night was
+Annie the superior barmaid, and not Sally of the automobile. But
+Mrs Colclough, if not beautiful, was a very agreeable creation.
+Her amplitude gave at first sight an exaggerated impression of her
+age; but this departed after more careful inspection. She could
+not have been more than thirty. She was very dark, with plenteous
+and untidy black hair, thick eyebrows, and a slight moustache. Her
+eyes were very vivacious, and her gestures, despite that bulk,
+quick and graceful. She was happy; her ideals were satisfied; it
+was probably happiness that had made her stout. Her massiveness
+was apparently no grief to her; she had fallen into the
+carelessness which is too often the pitfall of women who, being
+stout, are content.
+
+'How do, missis?' Mr Brindley greeted her, and to his wife, 'How
+do, missis? But, look here, bright star, this gadding about is all
+very well, but what about those precious kids of yours? None of
+'em dead yet, I hope.'
+
+'Don't be silly, Bob.'
+
+'I've been over to your house,' Mrs Colclough put in. 'Of course
+it isn't mumps. The child's as right as rain. So I brought Mary
+back with me.'
+
+'Well,' said Mr Brindley, 'for a woman who's never had any
+children your knowledge of children beggars description. What you
+aren't sure you know about them isn't knowledge. However--'
+
+'Listen,' Mrs Colclough replied, with a delightful throwingdown of
+the glove. 'I'll bet you a level sovereign that child hasn't got
+the mumps. So there! And Oliver will guarantee to pay you.'
+
+'Aye!' said Mr Colclough; 'I'll back my wife any day.'
+
+'Don't bet, Bob,' Mrs Brindley enjoined her husband excitedly in
+her high treble.
+
+'I won't,' said Mr Brindley.
+
+'Now let's sit down.' Mrs Colclough addressed me with particular,
+confidential grace.
+
+We three exactly filled the sofa. I have often sat between two
+women, but never with such calm, unreserved, unapprehensive
+comfortableness as I experienced between Mrs Colclough and Mrs
+Brindley. It was just as if I had known them for years.
+
+'You'll make a mess of that, Ol,' said Mr Brindley.
+
+The other two men were at some distance, in front of a table, on
+which were two champagne bottles and five glasses, and a plate of
+cakes. 'Well,' I said to myself, 'I'm not going to have any
+champagne, anyhow. Mercurey! Green Chartreuse! Irish whisky! And
+then champagne! And a morning's hard work tomorrow! No!'
+
+Plop! A cork flew up and bounced against the ceiling.
+
+Mr Colclough carefully emptied the bottle into the glasses, of
+which Mr Brindley seized two and advanced with one in either hand
+for the women. It was the host who offered a glass to me.
+
+'No, thanks very much, I really can't,' I said in a very firm
+tone.
+
+My tone was so firm that it startled them. They glanced at each
+other with alarmed eyes, like simple people confronted by an
+inexplicable phenomenon. 'But look here, mister!' said Mr
+Colclough, pained, 'we've got this out specially for you. You
+don't suppose this is our usual tipple, do you?'
+
+I yielded. I could do no less than sacrifice myself to their
+enchanting instinctive kindness of heart. 'I shall be dead
+tomorrow,' I said to myself; 'but I shall have lived tonight.'
+They were relieved, but I saw that I had given them a shock from
+which they could not instantaneously recover. Therefore I began
+with a long pull, to reassure them.
+
+'Mrs Brindley has been telling me that Simon Fuge is dead,' said
+Mrs Colclough brightly, as though Mrs Brindley had been telling
+her that the price of mutton had gone down.
+
+I perceived that those two had been talking over Simon Fuge, after
+their fashion.
+
+'Oh yes,' I responded.
+
+'Have you got that newspaper in your pocket, Mr Loring?' asked Mrs
+Brindley.
+
+I had.
+
+'No,' I said, feeling in my pockets; 'I must have left it at your
+house.'
+
+'Well,' she said, 'that's strange. I looked for it to show it to
+Mrs Colclough, but I couldn't see it.'
+
+This was not surprising. I did not want Mrs Colclough to read the
+journalistic obituary until she had given me her own obituary of
+Fuge.
+
+'It must be somewhere about,' I said; and to Mrs Colclough: 'I
+suppose you knew him pretty well?'
+
+'Oh, bless you, no! I only met him once.'
+
+'At Ilam?'
+
+'Yes. What are you going to do, Oliver?'
+
+Her husband was opening the piano.
+
+'Bob and I are just going to have another smack at that Brahms.'
+
+'You don't expect us to listen, do you?'
+
+'I expect you to do what pleases you, missis,' said he. 'I should
+be a bigger fool than I am if I expected anything else.' Then he
+smiled at me. 'No! Just go on talking. Ol and I'll drown you easy
+enough. Quite short! Back in five minutes.'
+
+The two men placed each his wine-glass on the space on the piano
+designed for a candlestick, lighted cigars, and sat down to play.
+
+'Yes,' Mrs Colclough resumed, in a lower, more confidential tone,
+to the accompaniment of the music. 'You see, there was a whole
+party of us there, and Mr Fuge was staying at the hotel, and of
+course he knew several of us.'
+
+'And he took you out in a boat?'
+
+'Me and Annie? Yes. Just as it was getting dusk he came up to us
+and asked us if we'd go for a row. Eh, I can hear him asking us
+now! I asked him if he could row, and he was quite angry. So we
+went, to quieten him.' She paused, and then laughed.
+
+'Sally!' Mrs Brindley protested. 'You know he's dead!'
+
+'Yes.' She admitted the rightness of the protest. 'But I can't
+help it. I was just thinking how he got his feet wet in pushing
+the boat off.' She laughed again. 'When we were safely off,
+someone came down to the shore and shouted to Mr Fuge to bring the
+boat back. You know his quick way of talking.' (Here she began to
+imitate Fuge.) '"I've quarrelled with the man this boat belongs
+to. Awful feud! Fact is, I'm in a hostile country here!" And a lot
+more like that. It seemed he had quarrelled with everybody in
+Ilam. He wasn't sure if the landlord of the hotel would let him
+sleep there again. He told us all about all his quarrels, until he
+dropped one of the oars. I shall never forget how funny he looked
+in the moonlight when he dropped the oar. "There, that's your
+fault!" he said. "You make me talk too much about myself, and I
+get excited." He kept striking matches to look for the oar, and
+turning the boat round and round with the other oar. "Last match!"
+he said. "We shall never see land tonight." Then he found the oar
+again. He considered we were saved. Then he began to tell us about
+his aunt. "You know I'd no business to be here. I came down from
+London for my aunt's funeral, and here I am in a boat at night
+with two pretty girls!" He said the funeral had taught him one
+thing, and that was that black neckties were the only possible
+sort of necktie. He said the greatest worry of his life had always
+been neckties; but he wouldn't have to worry any more, and so his
+aunt hadn't died for nothing. I assure you he kept on talking
+about neckties. I assure you, Mr Loring, I went to sleep--at least
+I dozed--and when I woke up he was still talking about neckties.
+But then his feet began to get cold. I suppose it was because they
+were wet. The way he grumbled about his feet being cold! I
+remember he turned his coat collar up. He wanted to get on shore
+and walk, but he'd taken us a long way up the lake by that time,
+and he saw we were absolutely lost. So he put the oars in the boat
+and stood up and stamped his feet. It might have upset the boat.'
+
+'How did it end?' I inquired.
+
+'Well, Annie and I caught the train, but only just. You see it was
+a special train, so they kept it for us, otherwise we should have
+been in a nice fix.'
+
+'So you have special trains in these parts?'
+
+'Why, of course! It was the annual outing of the teachers of St
+Luke's Sunday School and their friends, you see. So we had a
+special train.'
+
+At this point the duettists came to the end of a movement, and Mr
+Brindley leaned over to us from his stool, glass in hand.
+
+'The railway company practically owns Ilam,' he explained, 'and so
+they run it for all they're worth. They made the lake, to feed the
+canals, when they bought the canals from the canal company. It's
+an artificial lake, and the railway runs alongside it. A very good
+scheme of the company's. They started out to make Ilam a popular
+resort, and they've made it a popular resort, what with special
+trains and things. But try to get a special train to any other
+place on their rotten system, and you'll soon see!'
+
+'How big is the lake?' I asked.
+
+'How long is it, Ol?' he demanded of Colclough. 'A couple of
+miles?'
+
+'Not it! About a mile. Adagio!'
+
+They proceeded with Brahms.
+
+'He ran with you all the way to the station, didn't he?' Mrs
+Brindley suggested to Mrs Colclough.
+
+'I should just say he did!' Mrs Colclough concurred. 'He wanted to
+get warm, and then he was awfully afraid lest we should miss it.'
+
+'I thought you were on the lake practically all night!' I
+exclaimed.
+
+'All night! Well, I don't know what you call all night. But I was
+back in Bursley before eleven o'clock, I'm sure.'
+
+I then contrived to discover the Gazette in an unsearched pocket,
+and I gave it to Mrs Colclough to read. Mrs Brindley looked over
+her shoulder.
+
+There was no slightest movement of depreciation on Mrs Colclough's
+part. She amiably smiled as she perused the GAZETTE'S version of
+Fuge's version of the lake episode. Here was the attitude of the
+woman whose soul is like crystal. It seems to me that most women
+would have blushed, or dissented, or simulated anger, or failed to
+conceal vanity. But Mrs Coclough might have been reading a fairy
+tale, for any emotion she displayed.
+
+'Yes,' she said blandly; 'from the things Annie used to tell me
+about him sometimes, I should say that was just how he WOULD talk.
+They seem to have thought quite a lot of him in London, then?'
+
+'Oh, rather!' I said. 'I suppose your sister knew him pretty
+well?'
+
+'Annie? I don't know. She knew him.'
+
+I distinctly observed a certain self-consciousness in Mrs
+Colclough as she made this reply. Mrs Brindley had risen and with
+wifely attentiveness was turning over the music page for her
+husband.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Soon afterwards, for me, the night began to grow fantastic; it
+took on the colour of a gigantic adventure. I do not suppose that
+either Mr Brindley or Mr Colclough, or the other person who
+presently arrived, regarded it as anything but a pleasant
+conviviality, but to a man of my constitution and habits it was an
+almost incredible occurrence. The other person was the book-
+collecting doctor. He arrived with a discreet tap on the window at
+midnight, to spend the evening. Mrs Brindley had gone home and Mrs
+Colclough had gone to bed. The book-collecting doctor refused
+champagne; he was, in fact, very rude to champagne in general. He
+had whisky. And those astonishing individuals, Messieurs Brindley
+and Colclough, secretly convinced of the justice of the attack on
+champagne, had whisky too. And that still most astonishing
+individual, Loring of the B.M., joined them. It was the hour of
+limericks. Limericks were demanded for the diversion of the
+doctor, and I furnished them. We then listened to the tale of the
+doctor's experiences that day amid the sturdy, natural-minded
+population of a muling village not far from Bursley. Seldom have I
+had such a bath in the pure fluid of human nature. All sense of
+time was lost. I lived in an eternity. I could not suggest to my
+host that we should depart. I could, however, decline more whisky.
+And I could, given the chance, discourse with gay despair
+concerning the miserable wreck that I should be on the morrow in
+consequence of this high living. I asked them how I could be
+expected, in such a state, to judge delicate points of expertise
+in earthenware. I gave them a brief sketch of my customary
+evening, and left them to compare it with that evening. The doctor
+perceived that I was serious. He gazed at me with pity, as if to
+say: 'Poor frail southern organism! It ought to be in bed, with
+nothing inside it but tea!' What he did actually say was: 'You
+come round to my place, I'll soon put you right!' 'Can you stop me
+from having a headache tomorrow?' I eagerly asked. 'I think so,'
+he said with calm northern confidence.
+
+At some later hour Mr Brindley and I 'went round'. Mr Colclough
+would not come. He bade me good-bye, as his wife had done, with
+the most extraordinary kindness, the most genuine sorrow at
+quitting me, the most genuine pleasure in the hope of seeing me
+again.
+
+'There are three thousand books in this room!' I said to myself,
+as I stood in the doctor's electrically lit library.
+
+'What price this for a dog?' Mr Brindley drew my attention to an
+aristocratic fox-terrier that lay on the hearth. 'Well, Titus! Is
+it sleepy? Well, well! How many firsts has he won, doctor?'
+
+'Six,' said the doctor. 'I'll just fix you up, to begin with,' he
+turned to me.
+
+After I had been duly fixed up ('This'll help you to sleep, and
+THIS'll placate your "god",' said the doctor), I saw to my intense
+surprise that another 'evening' was to be instantly superimposed
+on the 'evening' at Mr Colclough's. The doctor and Mr Brindley
+carefully and deliberately lighted long cigars, and sank deeply
+into immense arm-chairs; and so I imitated them as well as I could
+in my feeble southern way. We talked books. We just simply
+enumerated books without end, praising or damning them, and
+arranged authors in neat pews, like cattle in classes at an
+agricultural show. No pastime is more agreeable to people who have
+the book disease, and none more quickly fleets the hours, and none
+is more delightfully futile.
+
+Ages elapsed, and suddenly, like a gun discharging, Mr Brindley
+said--
+
+'We must go!'
+
+Of all things that happened this was the most astonishing.
+
+We did go.
+
+'By the way, doc.,' said Mr Brindley, in the doctor's wide porch,
+'I forgot to tell you that Simon Fuge is dead.'
+
+'Is he?' said the doctor.
+
+'Yes. You've got a couple of his etchings, haven't you?'
+
+'No,' said the doctor. 'I had. But I sold them several months
+ago.'
+
+'Oh!' said Mr Brindley negligently; 'I didn't know. Well, so
+long!'
+
+We had a few hundred yards to walk down the silent, wide street,
+where the gas-lamps were burning with the strange, endless
+patience that gas-lamps have. The stillness of a provincial town
+at night is quite different from that of London; we might have
+been the only persons alive in England.
+
+Except for a feeling of unreality, a feeling that the natural
+order of things had been disturbed by some necromancer, I was
+perfectly well the same morning at breakfast, as the doctor had
+predicted I should be. When I expressed to Mr Brindley my
+stupefaction at this happy sequel, he showed a polite but careless
+inability to follow my line of thought. It appeared that he was
+always well at breakfast, even when he did stay up 'a little later
+than usual'. It appeared further that he always breakfasted at a
+quarter to nine, and read the Manchester Guardian during the meal,
+to which his wife did or did not descend--according to the moods
+of the nursery; and that he reached his office at a quarter to
+ten. That morning the mood of the nursery was apparently
+unpropitious. He and I were alone. I begged him not to pretermit
+his GUARDIAN, but to examine it and give me the news. He agreed,
+scarcely unwilling.
+
+'There's a paragraph in the London correspondence about Fuge,' he
+announced from behind the paper.
+
+'What do they say about him?'
+
+'Nothing particular.'
+
+'Now I want to ask you something,' I said.
+
+I had been thinking a good deal about the sisters and Simon Fuge.
+And in spite of everything that I had heard--in spite even of the
+facts that the lake had been dug by a railway company, and that
+the excursion to the lake had been an excursion of Sunday-school
+teachers and their friends--I was still haunted by certain notions
+concerning Simon Fuge and Annie Brett. Annie Brett's flush, her
+unshed tears; and the self-consciousness shown by Mrs Colclough
+when I had pointedly mentioned her sister's name in connection
+with Simon Fuge's: these were surely indications! And then the
+doctor's recitals of manners in the immediate neighbourhood of
+Bursley went to support my theory that even in Staffordshire life
+was very much life.
+
+'What?' demanded Mr Brindley.
+
+'Was Miss Brett ever Simon Fuge's mistress?'
+
+At that moment Mrs Brindley, miraculously fresh and smiling,
+entered the room.
+
+'Wife,' said Mr Brindley, without giving her time to greet me,
+'what do you think he's just asked me?'
+
+'_I_ don't know.'
+
+'He's just asked me if Annie Brett was ever Simon Fuge's
+mistress.'
+
+She sank into a chair.
+
+'Annie BRETT?' She began to laugh gently. 'Oh! Mr Loring, you
+really are too funny!' She yielded to her emotions. It may be said
+that she laughed as they can laugh in the Five Towns. She cried.
+She had to wipe away the tears of laughter.
+
+'What on earth made you think so?' she inquired, after recovery.
+
+'I--had an idea,' I said lamely. 'He always made out that one of
+those two sisters was so much to him, and I knew it couldn't be
+Mrs Colclough.'
+
+'Well,' she said, 'ask anybody down here, ANY-body! And see what
+they'll say.'
+
+'No,' Mr Brindley put in, 'don't go about asking ANY-body. You
+might get yourself disliked. But you may take it it isn't true.'
+
+'Most certainly,' his wife concurred with seriousness.
+
+'We reckon to know something about Simon Fuge down here,' Mr
+Brindley added. 'Also about the famous Annie.'
+
+'He must have flirted with her a good bit, anyhow,' I said.
+
+'Oh, FLIRT!' ejaculated Mr Brindley.
+
+I had a sudden dazzling vision of the great truth that the people
+of the Five Towns have no particular use for half-measures in any
+department of life. So I accepted the final judgement with
+meekness.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+I returned to London that evening, my work done, and the
+muncipality happily flattered by my judgement of the slip-
+decorated dishes. Mr Brindley had found time to meet me at the
+midday meal, and he had left his office earlier than usual in
+order to help me to drink his wife's afternoon tea. About an hour
+later he picked up my little bag, and said that he should
+accompany me to the little station in the midst of the desert of
+cinders and broken crockery, and even see me as far as Knype,
+where I had to take the London express. No, there are no half-
+measures in the Five Towns. Mrs Brindley stood on her doorstep,
+with her eldest infant on her shoulders, and waved us off. The
+infant cried, expressing his own and his mother's grief at losing
+a guest. It seems as if people are born hospitable in the Five
+Towns.
+
+We had not walked more than a hundred yards up the road when a
+motor-car thundered down upon us from the opposite direction. It
+was Mr Colclough's, and Mr Colclough was driving it. Mr Brindley
+stopped his friend with the authoritative gesture of a policeman.
+
+'Where are you going, Ol?'
+
+'Home, lad. Sorry you're leaving us so soon, Mr Loring.'
+
+'You're mistaken, my boy,' said Mr Brindley. 'You're just going to
+run us down to Knype station, first.'
+
+'I must look slippy, then,' said Mr Colclough.
+
+'You can look as slippy as you like,' said Mr Brindley.
+
+In another fifteen seconds we were in the car, and it had turned
+round, and was speeding towards Knype. A feverish journey! We
+passed electric cars every minute, and for three miles were
+continually twisting round the tails of ponderous, creaking, and
+excessively deliberate carts that dropped a trail of small coal,
+or huge barrels on wheels that dripped something like the finest
+Devonshire cream, or brewer's drays that left nothing behind them
+save a luscious odour of malt. It was a breathless slither over
+unctuous black mud through a long winding canon of brown-red
+houses and shops, with a glimpse here and there of a grey-green
+park, a canal, or a football field.
+
+'I daredn't hurry,' said Mr Colclough, setting us down at the
+station. 'I was afraid of a skid.' He had not spoken during the
+transit.
+
+'Don't put on side, Ol,' said Mr Brindley. 'What time did you get
+up this morning?'
+
+'Eight o'clock, lad. I was at th' works at nine.'
+
+He flew off to escape my thanks, and Mr Brindley and I went into
+the station. Owing to the celerity of the automobile we had half-
+an-hour to wait. We spent it chiefly at the bookstall. While we
+were there the extra-special edition of the STAFFORDSHIRE SIGNAL,
+affectionately termed 'the local rag' by its readers, arrived, and
+we watched a newsboy affix its poster to a board. The poster ran
+thus--
+
+HANBRIDGE RATES LIVELY MEETING
+
+            --
+
+KNYPE F.C. NEW CENTRE--FORWARD
+
+            --
+
+ALL--WINNERS AND S.P.
+
+Now, close by this poster was the poster of the DAILY TELEGRAPH,
+and among the items offered by the DAILY TELEGRAPH was: 'Death of
+Simon Fuge'. I could not forbear pointing out to Mr Brindley the
+difference between the two posters. A conversation ensued; and
+amid the rumbling of trains and the rough stir of the platform we
+got back again to Simon Fuge, and Mr Brindley's tone gradually
+grew, if not acrid, a little impatient.
+
+'After all,' he said, 'rates are rates, especially in Hanbridge.
+And let me tell you that last season Knype Football Club jolly
+nearly got thrown out of the First League. The constitution of the
+team for this next season--why, damn it, it's a question of
+national importance! You don't understand these things. If Knype
+Football Club was put into the League Second Division, ten
+thousand homes would go into mourning. Who the devil was Simon
+Fuge?'
+
+They joke with such extraordinary seriousness in the Five Towns
+that one is somehow bound to pretend that they are not joking. So
+I replied--
+
+'He was a great artist. And this is his native district. Surely
+you ought to be proud of him!'
+
+'He may have been a great artist,' said Mr Brindley, 'or he may
+not. But for us he was simply a man who came of a family that had
+a bad reputation for talking too much and acting the goat!'
+
+'Well,' I said, We shall see--in fifty years.'
+
+'That's just what we shan't,' said he. 'We shall be where Simon
+Fuge is--dead! However, perhaps we are proud of him. But you don't
+expect us to show it, do you? That's not our style.'
+
+He performed the quasi-winking phenomenon with his eyes. It was
+his final exhibition of it to me.
+
+'A strange place!' I reflected, as I ate my dinner in the dining-
+car, with the pressure of Mr Brindley's steely clasp still
+affecting my right hand, and the rich, honest cordiality of his au
+revoir in my heart. 'A place that is passing strange!'
+
+And I thought further: He may have been a boaster, and a
+chatterer, and a man who suffered from cold feet at the wrong
+moments! And the Five Towns may have got the better of him, now.
+But that portrait of the little girl in the Wedgwood Institution
+is waiting there, right in the middle of the Five Towns. And one
+day the Five Towns will have to 'give it best'. They can say what
+they like! ... What eyes the fellow had, when he was in the right
+company!
+
+
+
+
+IN A NEW BOTTLE
+
+
+Commercial travellers are rather like bees; they take the seed of
+a good story from one district and deposit it in another.
+
+Thus several localities, imperfectly righteous, have within recent
+years appropriated this story to their own annals. I once met an
+old herbalist from Wigan-Wigan of all places in beautiful
+England!--who positively asserted that the episode occurred just
+outside the London and North-Western main line station at Wigan.
+This old herbalist was no judge of the value of evidence. An
+undertaker from Hull told me flatly, little knowing who I was and
+where I came from, that he was the undertaker concerned in the
+episode. This undertaker was a liar. I use this term because there
+is no other word in the language which accurately expresses my
+meaning. Of persons who have taken the trouble to come over from
+the United States in order to inform me that the affair happened
+at Harper's Ferry, Poughkeepsie, Syracuse, Allegheny,
+Indianapolis, Columbus, Charlotte, Tabernacle, Alliance, Wheeling,
+Lynchburg, and Chicago it would be unbecoming to speak--they are
+best left to silence themselves by mutual recrimination. The fact
+is that the authentic scene of the affair was a third-class
+railway carriage belonging to the North Staffordshire Railway
+Company, and rolling on that company's loop-line between Longshaw
+and Hanbridge. The undertaker is now dead--it is a disturbing
+truth that even undertakers die sometimes--and since his widow has
+given me permission to mention his name, I shall mention his name.
+It was Edward Till. Of course everybody in the Five Towns knows
+who the undertaker was, and if anybody in the Five Towns should
+ever chance to come across this book, I offer him my excuses for
+having brought coals to Newcastle.
+
+Mr Till used to be a fairly well-known figure in Hanbridge, which
+is the centre of undertaking, as it is of everything else, in the
+Five Towns. He was in a small but a successful way of business,
+had one leg a trifle shorter than the other (which slightly
+deteriorated the majesty of his demeanour on solemn occasions),
+played the fiddle, kept rabbits, and was of a forgetful
+disposition. It was possibly this forgetful disposition which had
+prevented him from rising into a large way of business. All
+admired his personal character and tempered geniality; but there
+are some things that will not bear forgetting. However, the story
+touches but lightly that side of his individuality.
+
+One morning Mr Till had to go to Longshaw to fetch a baby's coffin
+which had been ordered under the mistaken impression that a
+certain baby was dead. This baby, I may mention, was the hero of
+the celebrated scare of Longshaw about the danger of being buried
+alive. The little thing had apparently passed away; and, what is
+more, an inquest had been held on it and its parents had been
+censured by the jury for criminal carelessness in overlaying it;
+and it was within five minutes of being nailed up, when it opened
+its eyes! You may imagine the enormous sensation that there was in
+the Five Towns. One doctor lost his reputation, naturally. He
+emigrated to the Continent, and now, practising at Lucerne in the
+summer and Mentone in the winter, charges fifteen shillings a
+visit (instead of three and six at Longshaw) for informing people
+who have nothing the matter with them that they must take care of
+themselves. The parents of the astonished baby moved the heaven
+and earth of the Five Towns to force the coroner to withdraw the
+stigma of the jury's censure; but they did not succeed, not even
+with the impassioned aid of two London halfpenny dailies.
+
+To resume, Mr Till had to go to Longshaw. Now, unless you possess
+a most minute knowledge of your native country, you are probably
+not aware that in Aynsley Street, Longshaw, there is a provision
+dealer whose reputation for cheeses would be national and supreme
+if the whole of England thought as the Five Towns thinks.
+
+'Teddy,' Mrs Till said, as Mr Till was starting, 'you might as
+well bring back with you a pound of Gorgonzola.' (Be it noted that
+I had the details of the conversation from the lady herself.)
+
+'Yes,' said he enthusiastically, 'I will.'
+
+'Don't go and forget it,' she enjoined him.
+
+'No,' he said. 'I'll tie a knot in my handkerchief.'
+
+'A lot of good that'll do!' she observed. 'You'd tied a knot in
+your handkerchief when you forgot that Councillor Barker's wife's
+funeral was altered from Tuesday to Monday.'
+
+'Ah!' he replied. 'But now I've got a bad cold.'
+
+'So you have!' she agreed, reassured.
+
+He tied the knot in his handkerchief and went.
+
+Thanks to his cold he did not pass the cheesemonger's without
+entering.
+
+He adored Gorgonzola, and he reckoned that he knew a bit of good
+Gorgonzola when he met with it. Moreover, he and the cheesemonger
+were old friends, he having buried three of the cheesemonger's
+children. He emerged from the cheesemonger's with a pound of the
+perfectest Gorgonzola that ever greeted the senses.
+
+The abode of the censured parents was close by, and also close to
+the station. He obtained the coffin without parley, and told the
+mother, who showed him the remarkable child with pride, that under
+the circumstances he should make no charge at all. It was a
+ridiculously small coffin. He was quite accustomed to coffins.
+Hence he did the natural thing. He tucked the little coffin under
+one arm, and, dangling the cheese (neat in brown paper and string)
+from the other hand, he hastened to the station. With his
+unmatched legs he must have made a somewhat noticeable figure.
+
+A loop-line train was waiting, and he got into it, put the cheese
+on the rack in a corner, and the coffin next to it, assured
+himself that he had not mislaid his return ticket, and sat down
+under his baggage. It was the slackest time of day, and, as the
+train started at Longshaw, there were very few passengers. He had
+the compartment to himself.
+
+He was just giving way to one of those moods of vague and pleasant
+meditation which are perhaps the chief joy of such a temperament,
+when he suddenly sprang up as if in fear. And fear had in fact
+seized him. Suppose he forgot those belongings on the rack?
+Suppose, sublimely careless, he descended from the train and left
+them there? What a calamity! And similar misadventures had
+happened to him before. It was the cheese that disquieted him. No
+one would be sufficiently unprincipled to steal the coffin, and he
+would ultimately recover it at the lost luggage office, babies'
+coffins not abounding on the North Staffordshire Railway. But the
+cheese! He would never see the cheese again! No integrity would be
+able to withstand the blandishments of that cheese. Moreover, his
+wife would be saddened. And for her he had a sincere and profound
+affection.
+
+His act of precaution was to lift the coffin down from the rack,
+and place it on the seat beside him, and then to put the parcel of
+cheese on the coffin. He surveyed the cheese on the coffin; he
+surveyed it with the critical and experienced eye of an
+undertaker, and he decided that, if anyone else got into the
+carriage, it would not look quite decent, quite becoming--in a
+word, quite nice. A coffin is a coffin, and people's feelings have
+to be considered.
+
+So he whipped off the lid of the coffin, stuck the cheese inside,
+and popped the lid on again. And he kept his hand on the coffin
+that he might not forget it. When the train halted at Knype, Mr
+Till was glad that he had put the cheese inside, for another
+passenger got into the compartment. And it was a clergyman. He
+recognized the clergyman, though the clergyman did not recognize
+him. It was the Reverend Claud ffolliott, famous throughout the
+Five Towns as the man who begins his name with a small letter,
+doesn't smoke, of course doesn't drink, but goes to football
+matches, has an average of eighteen at cricket, and makes a very
+pretty show with the gloves, in spite of his thirty-eight years;
+celibate, very High, very natty and learned about vestments,
+terrific at sick couches and funerals. Mr Till inwardly trembled
+to think what the Reverend Claud ffolliott might have said had he
+seen the cheese reposing in the coffin, though the coffin was
+empty.
+
+The parson, whose mind was apparently occupied, dropped into the
+nearest corner, which chanced to be the corner farthest away from
+Mr Till. He then instantly opened a copy of The Church Times and
+began to read it, and the train went forward. The parson sniffed,
+absently, as if he had been dozing and a fly had tickled his nose.
+Shortly afterwards he sniffed again, but without looking up from
+his perusals. He sniffed a third time, and glanced over the top
+edge of THE CHURCH TIMES at Mr Till. Calmed by the innocuous
+aspect of Mr Till, he bent once more to the paper. But after an
+interval he was sniffing furiously. He glanced at the window; it
+was open. Finally he lowered The CHURCH TIMES, as who should say:
+'I am a long-suffering man, but really this phenomenon which
+assaults my nostrils must be seriously inquired into.'
+
+Then it was that he caught sight of the coffin, with Mr Till's
+hand caressing it, and Mr Till all in black and carrying a
+funereal expression. He straightened himself, pulled himself
+together on account of his cloth, and said to Mr Till in his most
+majestic and sympathetic graveside voice--
+
+'Ah! my dear friend, I see that you have suffered a sad, sad
+bereavement.'
+
+That rich, resonant voice was positively thrilling when it
+addressed hopeless grief. Mr Till did not know what to say, nor
+where to look.
+
+'You have, however, one thing to be thankful for, very thankful
+for,' said the parson after a pause, 'you may be sure the poor
+thing is not in a trance.'
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Grim Smile of the Five Towns, by Arnold Bennett
+
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