Selected short stories
by
Contents
·
Phantom
·
Three
episodes in the life of Mr. Cowlishaw, Dentist
·
From one
generation to another
His worship the goosedriver
1.
It was an amiable but deceitful afternoon in the
third week of December. Snow fell heavily in the windows of confectioners'
shops, and Father Christmas smiled in Keats's Bazaar the fawning smile of a
myth who knows himself to be exploded; but beyond these and similar efforts to
remedy the forgetfulness of a careless climate, there was no sign anywhere in
the Five Towns, and especially in Bursley, of the immediate approach of the
season of peace, goodwill, and gluttony on earth.
At the Tiger, next door to Keats's in the
market-place, Mr. Josiah Topham Curtenty had put down his glass (the port was
kept specially for him), and told his boon companion, Mr. Gordon, that he must
be going. These two men had one powerful sentiment in common: they loved the
same woman. Mr. Curtenty, aged twenty-six in heart, thirty-six in mind, and
forty-six in looks, was fifty-six only in years. He was a rich man; he had made
money as an earthenware manufacturer in the good old times before Satan was
ingenious enough to invent German competition, American tariffs, and the price
of coal; he was still making money with the aid of his son Harry, who now
managed the works, but he never admitted that he was making it. No one has yet
succeeded, and no one ever will succeed, in catching an earthenware
manufacturer in the act of making money; he may confess with a sigh that he has
performed the feat in the past, he may give utterance to a vague, preposterous
hope that he will perform it again in the remote future, but as for surprising
him in the very act, you would as easily surprise a hen laying an egg. Nowadays
Mr. Curtenty, commercially secure, spent most of his energy in helping to shape
and control the high destinies of the town. He was Deputy-Mayor, and Chairman
of the General Purposes Committee of the Town Council; he was also a Guardian
of the Poor, a Justice of the Peace, President of the Society for the Prosecution
of Felons, a sidesman, an Oddfellow, and several other things that meant
dining, shrewdness, and good-nature. He was a short, stiff stout, red-faced
man, jolly with the jollity that springs from a kind heart, a humorous
disposition, a perfect digestion, and the respectful deference of one's
bank-manager. Without being a member of the Browning Society, he held firmly to
the belief that all's right with the world.
Mr. Gordon, who has but a sorry part in the drama,
was a younger, quieter, less forceful person, rather shy; a municipal
mediocrity, perhaps a little inflated that day by reason of his having been
elected to the Chairmanship of the Gas and Lighting Committee.
Both men had sat on their committees at the Town
Hall across the way that deceitful afternoon, and we see them now, after
refreshment well earned and consumed, about to separate and sink into private
life. But as they came out, into the portico of the Tiger, the famous
Calypso-like barmaid of the Tiger a hovering enchantment in the background, it
occurred that a flock of geese were meditating, as geese will, in the middle of
the road. The gooseherd, a shabby middle-aged man, looked as though he had
recently lost the Battle of Marathon, and was asking himself whether the path
of his retreat might not lie through the bar-parlour of the Tiger.
'Business pretty good?' Mr. Curtenty inquired of
him cheerfully.
In the Five Towns business takes the place of
weather as a topic of salutation.
'Business!' echoed the gooseherd.
In that one unassisted noun, scorning the aid of
verb, adjective, or adverb, the gooseherd, by a masterpiece of profound and
subtle emphasis, contrived to express the fact that he existed in a world of
dead illusions, that he had become a convert to Schopenhauer, and that Mr.
Curtenty's inapposite geniality was a final grievance to him.
'There ain't no business!' he added.
'Ah' returned Mr. Curtenty, thoughtful: such an
assertion of the entire absence of business was a reflection upon the town.
'Sithee!' said the gooseherd in ruthless accents,
'I druv these 'ere geese into this 'ere town this morning.' (Here he
exaggerated the number of miles traversed.) 'Twelve geese and two gander--a
Brent and a Barnacle. And how many is there now? How many?'
'Fourteen,' said Mr. Gordon, having counted; and
Mr. Curtenty gazed at him in reproach, for that he, a Town Councillor, had thus
mathematically demonstrated the commercial decadence of Bursley.
'Market overstocked, eh?' Mr. Curtenty suggested,
throwing a side-glance at Callear the poulterer's close by, which was crammed
with everything that flew, swam, or waddled.
'Call this a market?' said the gooseherd. 'I'st
tak' my lot over to Hanbridge, wheer there is a bit doing, by all
accounts.'
Now, Mr. Curtenty had not the least intention of
buying those geese, but nothing could be better calculated to straighten the
back of a Bursley man than a reference to the mercantile activity of Hanbridge,
that Chicago of the Five Towns.
'How much for the lot?' he inquired.
In that moment he reflected upon his reputation;
he knew that he was a cure, a card, a character; he knew that everyone would
think it just like Jos Curtenty, the renowned Deputy-Mayor of Bursley, to stand
on the steps of the Tiger and pretend to chaffer with a gooseherd for a flock
of geese. His imagination caught the sound of an oft-repeated inquiry, 'Did ye
hear about old Jos's latest--trying to buy them there geese?' and the
appreciative laughter that would follow.
The gooseherd faced him in silence.
'Well,' said Mr. Curtenty again, his eyes
twinkling, 'how much for the lot?'
The gooseherd gloomily and suspiciously named a
sum.
Mr. Curtenty named a sum startlingly less, ending
in sixpence.
'I'll tak' it,' said the gooseherd, in a tone that
closed on the bargain like a vice.
The Deputy-Mayor perceived himself the owner of
twelve geese and two ganders--one Brent, one Barnacle. It was a shock, but he
sustained it. Involuntarily he looked at Mr. Gordon.
'How are you going to get 'em home, Curtenty?'
asked Gordon, with coarse sarcasm; 'drive 'em?'
Nettled, Mr. Curtenty retorted:
'Now, then, Gas Gordon!'
The barmaid laughed aloud at this sobriquet, which
that same evening was all over the town, and which has stuck ever since to the
Chairman of the Gas and Lighting Committee. Mr. Gordon wished, and has never
ceased to wish, either that he had been elected to some other committee, or
that his name had begun with some other letter.
The gooseherd received the purchase-money like an
affront, but when Mr. Curtenty, full of private mirth, said, 'Chuck us your
stick in,' he gave him the stick, and smiled under reservation. Jos Curtenty
had no use for the geese; he could conceive no purpose which they might be made
to serve, no smallest corner for them in his universe. Nevertheless, since he
had rashly stumbled into a ditch, he determined to emerge from it grandly,
impressively, magnificently. He instantaneously formed a plan by which he would
snatch victory out of defeat. He would take Gordon's suggestion, and himself
drive the geese up to his residence in Hillport, that lofty and aristocratic
suburb. It would be an immense, an unparalleled farce; a wonder, a topic for
years, the crown of his reputation as a card.
He announced his intention with that misleading
sobriety and ordinariness of tone which it has been the foible of many great
humorists to assume. Mr. Gordon lifted his head several times very quickly, as
if to say, 'What next?' and then actually departed, which was a clear proof
that the man had no imagination and no soul.
The gooseherd winked.
'You be rightly called "Curtenty,"
mester,' said he, and passed into the Tiger.
'That's the best joke I ever heard,' Jos said to
himself 'I wonder whether he saw it.'
Then the procession of the geese and the
Deputy-Mayor commenced. Now, it is not to be assumed that Mr. Curtenty was
necessarily bound to look foolish in the driving of geese. He was no
nincompoop. On the contrary, he was one of those men who, bringing common-sense
and presence of mind to every action of their lives, do nothing badly, and
always escape the ridiculous. He marshalled his geese with notable gumption,
adopted towards them exactly the correct stress of persuasion, and presently he
smiled to see them preceding him in the direction of Hillport. He looked
neither to right nor left, but simply at his geese, and thus the quidnuncs of
the market-place and the supporters of shop-fronts were unable to catch his
eye. He tried to feel like a gooseherd; and such was his histrionic quality,
his instinct for the dramatic, he was a gooseherd, despite his blue
Melton overcoat, his hard felt hat with the flattened top, and that
opulent-curving collar which was the secret despair of the young dandies of
Hillport. He had the most natural air in the world. The geese were the victims
of this imaginative effort of Mr. Curtenty's. They took him seriously as a
goose-herd. These fourteen intelligences, each with an object in life, each
bent on self-aggrandisement and the satisfaction of desires, began to follow
the line of least resistance in regard to the superior intelligence unseen but
felt behind them, feigning, as geese will, that it suited them so to submit,
and that in reality they were still quite independent. But in the peculiar eye
of the Barnacle gander, who was leading, an observer with sufficient fancy
might have deciphered a mild revolt against this triumph of the absurd, the
accidental, and the futile; a passive yet Promethean spiritual defiance of the
supreme powers.
Mr. Curtenty got his fourteen intelligences safely
across the top of St. Luke's Square, and gently urged them into the steep
defile of
Halfway down
'I'll send for it,' he said; 'wait here.'
These were the only words uttered by him during a
memorable journey.
The second disaster was that the deceitful
afternoon turned to rain--cold, cruel rain, persistent rain, full of sinister
significance. Mr. Curtenty ruefully raised the velvet of his Melton. As he did
so a brougham rolled into
'I'm just the least bit glad she didn't see me.'
He had the suspicion, which recurs even to optimists, that happiness is after
all a chimera.
The third disaster was that the sun set and
darkness descended. Mr. Curtenty had, unfortunately, not reckoned with this
diurnal phenomenon; he had not thought upon the undesirability of being under
compulsion to drive geese by the sole illumination of gas-lamps lighted by
Corporation gas.
After this disasters multiplied. Dark and the rain
had transformed the farce into something else. It was five-thirty when at last
he reached The Firs, and the
'Damp, sir,' said Pond.
'Oh, nowt to speak of,' said Mr. Curtenty, and,
taking off his hat, he shot the fluid contents of the brim into Pond's face. It
was his way of dotting the 'i' of irony. 'Missis come in?'
'Yes, sir; I have but just rubbed the horse down.'
So far no reference to the surrounding geese, all
forlorn in the heavy winter rain.
'I've gotten a two-three geese and one gander here
for Christmas,' said Mr. Curtenty after a pause. To inferiors he always used
the dialect.
'Yes, sir.'
'Turn 'em into th' orchard, as you call it.'
'Yes, sir.'
'They aren't all here. Thou mun put th' horse in
the trap and fetch the rest thysen.'
'Yes, sir.'
'One's dead. A roadman's takkin' care on it in
'Yes, sir.'
'There's another got into th' cut [canal].'
'Yes, sir.'
'There's another strayed on the
railway-line--happen it's run over by this.'
'Yes, sir.',
'And one's making the best of her way to
Oldcastle. I couldna coax her in here.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Collect 'em.'
'Yes, sir.'
Mr. Curtenty walked away towards the house.
'Mester!' Pond called after him, flashing the
lantern.
'Well, lad?'
'There's no gander i' this lot.'
'Hast forgotten to count thysen?' Mr. Curtenty
answered blithely from the shelter of the, side-door.
But within himself he was a little crestfallen to
think that the surviving gander should have escaped his vigilance, even in the
darkness. He had set out to drive the geese home, and he had driven them home,
most of them. He had kept his temper, his dignity, his cheerfulness. He had got
a bargain in geese. So much was indisputable ground for satisfaction. And yet
the feeling of an anticlimax would not be dismissed. Upon the whole, his
transit lacked glory. It had begun in splendour, but it had ended in discomfort
and almost ignominy. Nevertheless, Mr. Curtenty's unconquerable soul asserted
itself in a quite genuine and tuneful whistle as he entered the house.
The fate of the Brent gander was never
ascertained.
2.
The dining-room of The Firs was a spacious and
inviting refectory, which owed nothing of its charm to William Morris,
To glance at this short, slight, yet plump little
creature as she reclined crosswise in the vast chair, leaving great spaces of
the seat unfilled, was to think rapturously to one's self: This is a woman.
Her fluffy head was such a dot against the back of the chair, the curve of her
chubby ringed hand above the head was so adorable, her black eyes were so
provocative, her slippered feet so wee--yes, and there was something so
mysteriously thrilling about the fall of her skirt that you knew instantly her
name was Clara, her temper both fiery and obstinate, and her personality
distracting. You knew that she was one of those women of frail physique who can
endure fatigues that would destroy a camel; one of those demonic women capable
of doing without sleep for ten nights in order to nurse you; capable of dying
and seeing you die rather than give way about the tint of a necktie; capable of
laughter and tears simultaneously; capable of never being in the wrong except
for the idle whim of so being. She had a big mouth and very wide nostrils, and
her years were thirty-five. It was no matter; it would have been no matter had
she been a hundred and thirty-five. In short…
Clara Curtenty wore tight-fitting black silk, with
a long gold chain that descended from her neck nearly to her waist, and was
looped up in the middle to an old-fashioned gold brooch. She was in mourning
for a distant relative. Black pre-eminently suited her. Consequently her
distant relatives died at frequent intervals.
The basalt clock on the mantelpiece trembled and
burst into the song of six. Clara Curtenty rose swiftly from the easy-chair,
and took her seat in front of the tea-tray. Almost at the same moment a neat
black-and-white parlour-maid brought in teapot, copper kettle, and a
silver-covered dish containing hot pikelets then departed. Clara was alone
again; not the same Clara now, but a personage demure, prim, precise,
frightfully upright of back--a sort of impregnable stronghold--without doubt a
Deputy-Mayoress.
At five past six Josiah Curtenty entered the room,
radiant from a hot bath, and happy in dry clothes--a fine, if mature, figure of
a man. His presence filled the whole room.
'Well, my chuck!' he said, and kissed her on the
cheek.
She gazed at him with a look that might mean
anything. Did she raise her cheek to his greeting, or was it fancy that she had
endured, rather than accepted, his kiss? He was scarcely sure. And if she had
endured instead of accepting the kiss, was her mood to be attributed to his
lateness for tea, or to the fact that she was aware of the episode of the
geese? He could not divine.
'Pikelets! Good!' he exclaimed, taking the cover
off the dish.
This strong, successful, and dominant man adored
his wife, and went in fear of her. She was his first love, but his second
spouse. They had been married ten years. In those ten years they had quarrelled
only five times, and she had changed the very colour of his life. Till his
second marriage he had boasted that he belonged to the people and retained the
habits of the people. Clara, though she also belonged to the people, very soon
altered all that. Clara had a passion for the genteel. Like many warm-hearted,
honest, clever, and otherwise sensible persons, Clara was a snob, but a
charming little snob. She ordered him to forget that he belonged to the people.
She refused to listen when he talked in the dialect. She made him dress with
opulence, and even with tidiness; she made him buy a fashionable house and fill
it with fine furniture; she made him buy a brougham in which her gentility
could pay calls and do shopping (she shopped in Oldcastle, where a decrepit
aristocracy of tradesmen sneered at Hanbridge's lack of style); she had her
'day'; she taught the servants to enter the reception-rooms without knocking;
she took tea in bed in the morning, and tea in the afternoon in the drawing-room.
She would have instituted dinner at seven, but she was a wise woman, and
realized that too much tyranny often means revolution and the crumbling of
thrones; therefore the ancient plebeian custom of high tea at six was allowed
to persist and continue.
She it was who had compelled Josiah (or bewitched,
beguiled, coaxed and wheedled him), after a public refusal, to accept the
unusual post of Deputy-Mayor. In two years' time he might count on being Mayor.
Why, then, should Clara have been so anxious for this secondary dignity?
Because, in that year of royal festival, Bursley, in common with many other
boroughs, had had a fancy to choose a Mayor out of the House of Lords. The Earl
of Chell, a magnate of the county, had consented to wear the mayoral chain and dispense
the mayoral hospitalities on condition that he was provided with a deputy for
daily use.
It was the idea of herself being deputy to the
lovely, meddlesome, and arrogant Countess of Chell that had appealed to Clara.
The deputy of a Countess at length spoke.
'Will Harry be late at the works again tonight?'
she asked in her colder, small-talk manner, which committed her to nothing, as
Josiah well knew.
Her way of saying that word 'Harry' was inimitably
significant. She gave it an air. She liked Harry, and she liked Harry's name,
because it had a Kensingtonian sound. Harry, so accomplished in business, was
also a dandy, and he was a dog. 'My stepson'--she loved to introduce him, so
tall, manly, distinguished, and dandiacal. Harry, enriched by his own mother,
belonged to a
'Like as not,' said Josiah. 'I haven't been to the
works this afternoon.'
Another silence fell, and then Josiah, feeling
himself unable to bear any further suspense as to his wife's real mood and
temper, suddenly determined to tell her all about the geese, and know the worst.
And precisely at the instant that he opened his mouth, the maid opened the door
and announced:
'Mr. Duncalf wishes to see you at once, sir. He
won't keep you a minute.'
'Ask him in here, Mary,' said the Deputy-Mayoress
sweetly; 'and bring another cup and saucer.'
Mr. Duncalf was the Town Clerk of Bursley: legal,
portly, dry, and a little shy.
'I won't stop, Curtenty. How d'ye do, Mrs.
Curtenty? No, thanks, really--'But she, smiling, exquisitely gracious,
flattered and smoothed him into a chair.
'Any interesting news, Mr. Duncalf?' she said, and
added: 'But we're glad that anything should have brought you in.'
'Well,' said Duncalf, 'I've just had a letter by
the afternoon post from Lord Chell.'
'Oh, the Earl! Indeed; how very interesting.'
'What's he after?' inquired Josiah cautiously. 'He
says he's just been appointed Governor of East Australia--announcement 'll be
in tomorrow's papers--and so he must regretfully resign the mayoralty. Says
he'll pay the fine, but of course we shall have to remit that by special
resolution of the Council.'
'Well, I'm damned!' Josiah exclaimed.
'Topham!' Mrs. Curtenty remonstrated, but with a
delightful acquitting dimple. She never would call him Josiah, much less Jos.
Topham came more easily to her lips, and sometimes Top.
'Your husband,' said Mr. Duncalf impressively to
Clara, 'will, of course, have to step into the Mayor's shoes, and you'll have
to fill the place of the Countess.' He paused, and added: 'And very well you'll
do it, too--very well. Nobody better.'
The Town Clerk frankly admired Clara.
'Mr. Duncalf--Mr. Duncalf!' She raised a finger at
him. 'You are the most shameless flatterer in the town.'
The flatterer was flattered. Having delivered the
weighty news, he had leisure to savour his own importance as the bearer of it.
He drank a cup of tea. Josiah was thoughtful, but Clara brimmed over with a
fascinating loquacity. Then Mr. Duncalf said that he must really be going, and,
having arranged with the Mayor-elect to call a special meeting on the Council
at once, he did go, all the while wishing he had the enterprise to stay.
Josiah accompanied him to the front-door. The sky
had now cleared.
'Thank ye for calling,' said the host.
'Oh, that's all right. Good-night, Curtenty. Got
that goose out of the canal?'
So the story was all abroad!
Josiah returned to the dining-room, imperceptibly
smiling. At the door the sight of his wife halted him. The face of that
precious and adorable woman flamed out lightning and all menace and offence.
Her louring eyes showed what a triumph of dissimulation she must have achieved
in the presence of Mr. Duncalf, but now she could speak her mind.
'Yes, Topham!' she exploded, as though finishing
an harangue. 'And on this day of all days you choose to drive geese in the
public road behind my carriage!'
Jos was stupefied, annihilated.
'Did you see me, then, Clarry?'
He vainly tried to carry it off.
'Did I see you? Of course I saw you!'
She withered him up with the hot wind of scorn.
'Well,' he said foolishly, 'how was I to know that
the Earl would resign just today?'
'How were you to--?'
Harry came in for his tea. He glanced from one to
the other, discreet, silent. On the way home he had heard the tale of the geese
in seven different forms. The DeputyMayer, so soon to be Mayor, walked out of
the room.
'Pond has just come back, father,' said Harry; 'I
drove up the hill with him.'
And as Josiah hesitated a moment in the hall, he
heard Clara exclaim, 'Oh, Harry!"
'Damn!' he murmured.
3.
The Signal of the following day contained the
announcement which Mr. Duncalf had forecast; it also stated, on authority, that
Mr. Josiah Curtenty would wear the mayoral chain of Bursley immediately, and
added as its own private opinion that, in default of the Right Honourable the
Earl of Chell and his Countess, no better 'civic heads' could have been found
than Mr. Curtenty and his charming wife. So far the tone of the Signal
was unimpeachable. But underneath all this was a sub-title, 'Amusing Exploit of
the Mayor-elect,' followed by an amusing description of the procession of the
geese, a description which concluded by referring to Mr. Curtenty as His
Worship the Goosedriver.
Hanbridge, Knype, Longshaw, and Turnhill laughed
heartily, and perhaps a little viciously, at this paragraph, but Bursley was
annoyed by it. In print the affair did not look at all well. Bursley prided
itself on possessing a unique dignity as the 'Mother of the Five Towns,' and to
be presided over by a goosedriver, however humorous and hospitable he might be,
did not consort with that dignity. A certain Mayor of Longshaw, years before,
had driven a sow to market, and derived a tremendous advertisement therefrom,
but Bursley had no wish to rival Longshaw in any particular. Bursley regarded
Longshaw as the Inferno of the Five Towns. In Bursley you were bidden to go to
Longshaw as you were bidden to go to…Certain acute people in Hillport saw
nothing but a paralyzing insult in the opinion of the Signal (first and
foremost a Hanbridge organ), that Bursley could find no better civic head than
Josiah Curtenty. At least three Aldermen and seven Councillors privately, and
in the Tiger, disagreed with any such view of Bursley's capacity to find heads.
And underneath all this brooding dissatisfaction
lurked the thought, as the alligator lurks in a muddy river, that 'the Earl
wouldn't like it'--meaning the geese episode. It was generally felt that the
Earl had been badly treated by Jos Curtenty. The town could not explain its
sentiments--could not argue about them. They were not, in fact, capable of
logical justification; but they were there, they violently existed. It would
have been useless to point out that if the inimitable Jos had not been called
to the mayoralty the episode of the geese would have passed as a gorgeous joke;
that everyone had been vastly amused by it until that desolating issue of the Signal
announced the Earl's retirement; that Jos Curtenty could not possibly have
foreseen what was about to happen; and that, anyhow, goose-driving was less a
crime than a social solecism, and less a social solecism than a brilliant
eccentricity. Bursley was hurt, and logic is no balm for wounds.
Some may ask: If Bursley was offended, why did it
not mark its sense of Josiah's failure to read the future by electing another
Mayor? The answer is, that while all were agreed that his antic was
inexcusable, all were equally agreed to pretend that it was a mere trifle of no
importance; you cannot deprive a man of his prescriptive right for a mere
trifle of no importance. Besides, nobody could be so foolish as to imagine that
goosedriving, though reprehensible in a Mayor about to succeed an Earl, is an
act of which official notice can be taken.
The most curious thing in the whole imbroglio is
that Josiah Curtenty secretly agreed with his wife and the town. He was
ashamed, overset. His procession of geese appeared to him in an entirely new
light, and he had the strength of mind to admit to himself, 'I've made a fool
of myself.'
Harry went to
The Town Council duly met in special conclave, and
Josiah Topham Curtenty became Mayor of Bursley.
Shortly after Christmas it was announced that the
Mayor and Mayoress had decided to give a New Year's treat to four hundred poor,
old people in the St. Luke's covered market. It was also spread about that this
treat would eclipse and extinguish all previous treats of a similar nature, and
that it might be accepted as some slight foretaste of the hospitality which the
Mayor and Mayoress would dispense in that memorable year of royal festival. The
treat was to occur on January 9, the Mayoress's birthday.
On January 7 Josiah happened to go home early. He
was proceeding into the drawing-room without enthusiasm to greet his wife, when
he heard voices within; and one voice was the voice of Gas Gordon.
Jos stood still. It has been mentioned that Gordon
and the Mayor were in love with the same woman. The Mayor had easily captured
her under the very guns of his not formidable rival, and he had always
thereafter felt a kind of benevolent, good-humoured, contemptuous pity for
Gordon--Gordon, whose life was a tragic blank; Gordon, who lived, a melancholy
and defeated bachelor, with his mother and two unmarried sisters older than
himself. That Gordon still worshipped at the shrine did not disturb him; on the
contrary, it pleased him. Poor Gordon!
'But, really, Mrs. Curtenty,' Gordon was
saying--'really, you know I--that--is--really--'
'To please me!' Mrs. Curtenty entreated, with a
seductive charm that Jos felt even outside the door.
Then there was a pause.
'Very well,' said Gordon.
Mr. Curtenty tiptoed away and back into the
street. He walked in the dark nearly to Oldcastle, and returned about six o'clock.
But, Clara said no word of Gordon's visit. She had scarcely spoken to Topham
for three weeks.
The next morning, as Harry was departing to the
works, Mrs. Curtenty followed the handsome youth into the hall.
'Harry,' she whispered, 'bring me two ten-pound
notes this afternoon, will you, and say nothing to your father.'
4.
Gas Gordon was to be on the platform at the poor
people's treat. As he walked down
The treat, which took the form of a dinner, was an
unqualified success; it surpassed all expectations. Even the diners themselves
were satisfied--a rare thing at such affairs. Goose was a prominent item in the
menu. After the repast the replete guests were entertained from the platform,
the Mayor being, of course, in the chair. Harry sang 'In Old Madrid,'
accompanied by his stepmother, with faultless expression. Mr. Duncalf
astonished everybody with the famous North-Country recitation, 'The Patent
Hair-brushing Mashane.' There were also a banjo solo, a skirt dance of
discretion, and a campanological turn. At last, towards ten o'clock, Mr.
Gordon, who had hitherto done nothing, rose in his place, amid good-natured
cries of 'Gas!'
'I feel sure you will all agree with me,' he
began, 'that this evening would not be complete without a vote of thanks--a
very hearty vote of thanks--to our excellent host and chairman.'
Ear-splitting applause.
'I've got a little story to tell you,' he
continued--'a story that up to this moment has been a close secret between his
Worship the Mayor and myself.' His Worship looked up sharply at the speaker.
'You've heard about some geese, I reckon. (Laughter.) Well, you've not
heard all, but I'm going to tell you. I can't keep it to myself any longer. You
think his Worship drove those geese--I hope they're digesting well (loud
laughter)--just for fun. He didn't. I was with him when he bought them, and
I happened to say that goosedriving was a very difficult accomplishment.'
'Depends on the geese!' shouted a voice.
'Yes, it does,' Mr. Gordon admitted. 'Well, his
Worship contradicted me, and we had a bit of an argument. I don't bet, as you
know--at least, not often--but I don't mind confessing that I offered to bet
him a sovereign he couldn't drive his geese half a mile. "Look here,
Gordon," he said to me: "there's a lot of distress in the town just
now--trade bad, and so on, and so on. I'll lay you a level ten pounds I drive
these geese to Hillport myself, the loser to give the money to charity."
"Done," I said. "Don't say anything
about it," he says. "I won't," I says--but I am doing. (Applause.)
I feel it my duty to say something about it. (More applause.) Well, I
lost, as you all know. He drove '
It was colossal, the enthusiasm.
'And for Gas Gordon!' called several
voices.
The cheers rose again in surging waves.
Everyone remarked that the Mayor, usually so
imperturbable, was quite overcome--seemed as if he didn't know where to look.
Afterwards, as the occupants of the platform
descended, Mr. Gordon glanced into the eyes of Mrs. Curtenty, and found there
his exceeding reward. The mediocrity had blossomed out that evening into
something new and strange. Liar, deliberate liar and self-accused gambler as he
was, he felt that he had lived during that speech; he felt that it was the
supreme moment of his life.
'What a perfectly wonderful man your husband is!'
said Mrs. Duncalf to Mrs. Curtenty.
Clara turned to her husband with a sublime gesture
of satisfaction. In the brougham, going home, she bewitched him with wifely
endearments. She could afford to do so. The stigma of the geese episode was
erased.
But the barmaid of the Tiger, as she let down her
bright hair that night in the attic of the Tiger, said to herself, 'Well, of
all the--' Just that.
Phantom
1.
The heart of the Five Towns--that undulating patch
of England covered with mean streets, and dominated by tall smoking chimneys,
whence are derived your cups and saucers and plates, some of your coal, and a
portion of your iron--is Hanbridge, a borough larger and busier than its four
sisters, and even more grimy and commonplace than they. And the heart of
Hanbridge is probably the offices of the Five Towns Banking Company, where the
last trace of magic and romance is beaten out of human existence, and the
meaning of life is expressed in balances, deposits, percentages, and
overdrafts--especially overdrafts. In a fine suite of rooms on the first floor
of the bank building resides Mr. Lionel Woolley, the manager, with his wife May
and their children. Mrs. Woolley is compelled to change her white
window-curtains once a week because of the smuts. Mr. Woolley, forty-five,
rather bald, frigidly suave, positive, egotistic, and pontifical, is a specimen
of the man of business who is nothing else but a man of business. His career
has been a calculation from which sentiment is entirely omitted; he has no
instinct for the things which cannot be defined and assessed. Scarcely a
manufacturer in Hanbridge but who inimically and fearfully regards Mr. Woolley
as an amazing instance of a creature without a soul; and the absence of soul in
a fellow-man must be very marked indeed before a Hanbridge manufacturer notices
it. There are some sixty thousand immortal souls in Hanbridge, but they seldom
attract attention.
Yet Mr. Woolley was once brought into contact with
the things which cannot be defined and assessed; once he stood face to face
with some strange visible resultant of those secret forces that lie beyond the
human ken. And, moreover, the adventure affected the whole of his domestic
life. The wonder and the pathos of the story lie in the fact that Nature, prodigal
though she is known to be, should have wasted the rare and beautiful visitation
on just Mr. Woolley. Mr. Woolley was bathed in romance of the most singular
kind, and the precious fluid ran off him like water off a duck's back.
2.
Ten years ago on a Thursday afternoon in July,
Lionel Woolley, as he walked up through the new park at Bursley to his celibate
rooms in Park Terrace, was making addition sums out of various items connected
with the institution of marriage. Bursley is next door to Hanbridge, and Lionel
happened then to be cashier of the Bursley branch of the bank. He had in mind
two possible wives, each of whom possessed advantages which appealed to him,
and he was unable to decide between them by any mathematical process. Suddenly,
from a glazed shelter near the empty bandstand, there emerged in front of him
one of the delectable creatures who had excited his fancy. May
'Well, Mr. Woolley,' she said easily, stopping for
him as she raised her sunshade, 'how satisfied you look!'
'It's the sight of you,' he replied, without a
moment's hesitation.
He had a fine assured way with women (he need not
have envied a curate accustomed to sewing meetings), and May Lawton belonged to
the type of girl whose demeanour always challenges the masculine in a man.
Gazing at her, Lionel was swiftly conscious of several things: the piquancy of
her snub nose, the brightness of her smile, at once defiant and wistful, the
lingering softness of her gloved hand, and the extraordinary charm of her
sunshade, which matched her dress and formed a sort of canopy and frame for
that intelligent, tantalizing face. He remembered that of late he and she had
grown very intimate; and it came upon him with a shock, as though he had just
opened a telegram which said so, that May, and not the other girl, was his
destined mate. And he thought of her fortune, tiny but nevertheless useful, and
how clever she was, and how inexplicably different from the rest of her sex,
and how she would adorn his house, and set him off, and help him in his career.
He heard himself saying negligently to friends: 'My wife speaks French like a
native. Of course, my wife has travelled a great deal. My wife has thoroughly
studied the management of children. Now, my wife does understand the art of
dress. I put my wife's bit of money into so-and-so.' In short, Lionel was as
near being in love as his character permitted.
And while he walked by May's side past the
bowling-greens at the summit of the hill, she lightly quizzing the raw newness
of the park and its appurtenances, he wondered, he honestly wondered, that he
could ever have hesitated between May Lawton and the other. Her superiority was
too obvious; she was a woman of the world! She…In a flash he knew that he would
propose to her that very afternoon. And when he had suggested a stroll towards
Moorthorne, and she had deliciously agreed, he was conscious of a tumultuous
uplifting and splendid carelessness of spirits. 'Imagine me bringing it to a
climax to-day,' he reflected, profoundly pleased with himself. 'Ah well, it
will be settled once for all!' He admired his own decision; he was quite struck
by it. 'I shall call her May before I leave her,' he thought, gazing at her,
and discovering how well the name suited her, with its significances of
alertness, geniality, and half-mocking coyness.
'So school is closed,' he said, and added
humorously: '"Broken up" is the technical term, I believe.'
'Yes,' she answered, 'and I had walked out into
the park to meditate seriously upon the question of my holiday.'
She caught his eye in a net of bright glances, and
romance was in the air. They had crossed a couple of smoke-soiled fields, and
struck into the old Hanbridge road just below the abandoned toll-house with its
broad eaves.
'And whither do your meditations point?' he
demanded playfully.
'My meditations point to
The reference to foreign climes impressed him.
'Would that I could go to
'Why?' she questioned, with elaborate simplicity.
At the moment, as they were passing the
toll-house, the other girl appeared surprisingly from round the corner of the
toll-house, where the lane from Toft End joins the highroad. This second
creature was smaller than Miss Lawton, less assertive, less intelligent,
perhaps, but much more beautiful.
Everyone halted and everyone blushed.
'May!' the interrupter at length stammered.
'May!' responded Miss Lawton lamely.
The other girl was named May too--May Deane, child
of the well-known majolica manufacturer, who lived with his sons and daughter
in a solitary and ancient house at Toft End.
Lionel Woolley said nothing until they had all
shaken hands--his famous way with women seemed to have deserted him--and then
he actually stated that he had forgotten an appointment, and must depart. He
had gone before the girls could move.
When they were alone, the two Mays fronted each
other, confused, hostile, almost homicidal.
'I hope I didn't spoil a tęte-a-tęte,' said
May Deane, stiffly and sharply, in a manner quite foreign to her soft and
yielding nature.
The schoolmistress, abandoning herself to an
inexplicable but overwhelming impulse, took breath for a proud lie.
'No,' she answered; 'but if you had come three
minutes earlier--'
She smiled calmly.
'Oh!' murmured May Deane, after a pause.
3.
That evening May Deane returned home at half-past
nine. She had been with her two brothers to a lawn-tennis party at Hillport,
and she told her father, who was reading the Stafordshire Signal in his
accustomed solitude, that the boys were staying later for cards, but that she
had declined to stay because she felt tired. She kissed the old widower
good-night, and said that she should go to bed at once. But before retiring she
visited the housekeeper in the kitchen in order to discuss certain household
matters: Jim's early breakfast, the proper method of washing Herbert's new
flannels (Herbert would be very angry if they were shrunk), and the
dog-biscuits for Carlo. These questions settled, she went to her room, drew the
blind, lighted some candles, and sat down near the window.
She was twenty-two, and she had about her that
strange and charming nun-like mystery which often comes to a woman who lives
alone and unguessed-at among male relatives. Her room was her bower. No one,
save the servants and herself, ever entered it. Mr. Deane and Jim and Bertie
might glance carelessly through the open door in passing along the corridor,
but had they chanced in idle curiosity to enter, the room would have struck
them as unfamiliar, and they might perhaps have exclaimed with momentary
interest, 'So this is May's room!' And some hint that May was more than a
daughter and sister--a woman, withdrawn, secret, disturbing, living her own
inner life side by side with the household life--might have penetrated their
obtuse paternal and fraternal masculinity. Her beautiful face (the nose and
mouth were perfect, and at either extremity of the upper lip grew a soft down),
her dark hair, her quiet voice and her gentle acquiescence (diversified by
occasional outbursts of sarcasm), appealed to them and won them; but they
accepted her as something of course, as something which went without saying.
They adored her, and did not know that they adored her.
May took off her hat, stuck the pins into it
again, and threw it on the bed, whose white and green counterpane hung down
nearly to the floor on either side. Then she lay back in the chair, and,
pulling away the blind, glanced through the window; the moon, rather dim behind
the furnace lights of Red Cow Ironworks, was rising over Moorthorne. May
dropped the blind with a wearied gesture, and turned within the room, examining
its contents as if she had not seen them before: the wardrobe, the chest of
drawers, which was also a dressing-table, the washstand, the dwarf book-case
with its store of Edna Lyalls, Elizabeth Gaskells, Thackerays, Charlotte
Yonges, Charlotte Brontës, a Thomas Hardy or so, and some old school-books. She
looked at the pictures, including a sampler worked by a deceased aunt, at the
loud-ticking Swiss clock on the mantelpiece, at the higgledy-piggledy
photographs there, at the new Axminster carpet, the piece of linoleum in front
of the washstand, and the bad joining of the wallpaper to the left of the door.
She missed none of the details which she knew so well, with such long
monotonous intimacy, and sighed.
Then she got up from the chair, and, opening a
small drawer in the chest of drawers, put her hand familiarly to the back and
drew forth a photograph. She carried the photograph to the light of the candles
on the mantelpiece, and gazed at it attentively, puckering her brows. It was a
portrait of Lionel Woolley. Heaven knows by what subterfuge or lucky accident
she had obtained it, for Lionel certainly had not given it to her. She loved
Lionel. She had loved him for five years, with a love silent, blind, intense,
irrational, and too elemental to be concealed. Everyone knew of May's passion.
Many women admired her taste; a few were shocked and puzzled by it. All the men
of her acquaintance either pitied or despised her for it. Her father said
nothing. Her brothers were less cautious, and summed up their opinion of Lionel
in the curt, scornful assertion that he showed a tendency to cheat at tennis.
But May would never hear ill of him; he was a god to her, and she could not
hide her worship. For more than a year, until lately, she had been almost sure
of him, and then came a faint vague rumour concerning Lionel and May Lawton, a
rumour which she had refused to take seriously. The encounter of that
afternoon, and Miss Lawton's triumphant remark, had dazed her. For seven hours
she had existed in a kind of semi-conscious delirium, in which she could
perceive nothing but the fatal fact, emerging more clearly every moment from
the welter of her thoughts, that she had lost Lionel. Lionel had proposed to
May
She tore up the photograph, put the fragments in
the grate, and set a light to them.
Her father's step sounded on the stairs; he
hesitated, and knocked sharply at her door.
'What's burning, May?'
'It's all right, father,' she answered calmly.
'I'm only burning some papers in the fire-grate.'
'Well, see you don't burn the house down.'
He passed on.
Then she found a sheet of notepaper, and wrote on
it in pencil, using the mantelpiece for a desk: 'Dear home. Good-night,
good-bye.' She cogitated, and wrote further: 'Forgive
She put the message in an envelope, and wrote on
the envelope 'Jim,' and placed it prominently in front of the clock. But after
she had looked at it for a minute, she wrote 'Father' above Jim, and then
'Herbert' below.
There were noises in the hall; the boys had
returned earlier than she expected. As they went along the corridor and caught
a glimpse of her light under the door, Jim cried gaily: 'Now then, out with
that light! A little thing like you ought to be asleep hours since.'
She listened for the bang of their door, and then,
very hurriedly, she removed her pink frock and put on an old black one, which
was rather tight in the waist. And she donned her hat, securing it carefully
with both pins, extinguished the candles, and crept quietly downstairs, and so
by the back-door into the garden. Carlo, the retriever, came halfway out of his
kennel and greeted her in the moonlight with a yawn. She patted his head and
ran stealthily up the garden, through the gate, and up the waste green land
towards the crown of the hill.
4.
The top of Toft End is the highest land in the
Five Towns, and from it may be clearly seen all the lurid evidences of
manufacture which sweep across the borders of the sky on north, east, west, and
south. North-eastwards lie the moorlands, and far off Manifold, the 'metropolis
of the moorlands,' as it is called. On this night the furnaces of Red Cow
Ironworks, in the hollow to the east, were in full blast; their fluctuating
yellow light illuminated queerly the grass of the fields above Deane's house,
and the regular roar of their breathing reached that solitary spot like the
distant rumour of some leviathan beast angrily fuming. Further away to the
south-west the Cauldon Bar Ironworks reproduced the same phenomena, and round
the whole horizon, near and far, except to the north-east, the lesser fires of
labour leapt and flickered and glinted in their mists of smoke, burning
ceaselessly, as they burned every night and every day at all seasons of all
years. The town of Bursley slept in the deep valley to the west, and vast
Hanbridge in the shallower depression to the south, like two sleepers
accustomed to rest quietly amid great disturbances; the beacons of their Town
Halls and churches kept watch, and the whole scene was dominated by the
placidity of the moon, which had now risen clear of the Red Cow furnace clouds,
and was passing upwards through tracts of stars.
Into this scene, climbing up from the direction of
Manifold, came Lionel Woolley, nearly at midnight, having walked some eighteen
miles in a vain effort to re-establish his self-satisfaction by a process of
reasoning and ingenious excuses. Lionel felt that in the brief episode of the
afternoon he had scarcely behaved with dignity. In other words, he was fully
and painfully aware that he must have looked a fool, a coward, an ass, a
contemptible and pitiful person, in the eyes of at least one girl, if not of
two. He did not like this--no man would have liked it; and to Lionel the memory
of an undignified act was acuter torture. Why had he bidden the girls adieu and
departed? Why had he, in fact, run away? What precisely would May Lawton think
of him? How could he explain his conduct to her--and to himself? And had that
worshipping, affectionate thing, May Deane, taken note of his confusion--of the
confusion of him who was never confused, who was equal to every occasion and
every emergency? These were some of the questions which harried him and
declined to be settled. He had walked to Manifold, and had tea at the Roebuck,
and walked back, and still the questions were harrying; and as he came over the
hill by the field-path, and descried the lone house of the Deanes in the light
of the Red Cow furnaces and of the moon, the worship of May Deane seemed
suddenly very precious to him, and he could not bear to think that any
stupidity of his should have impaired it.
Then he saw May Deane walking slowly across the
field, close to an abandoned pit-shaft, whose low protecting circular wall of
brick was crumbling to ruin on the side nearest to him.
She stopped, appeared to gaze at him intently,
turned, and began to approach him. And he too, moved by a mysterious impulse
which he did not pause to examine, swerved, and quickened his step in order to
lessen the distance between them. He did not at first even feel surprise that
she should be wandering solitary on the hill at that hour. Presently she stood
still, while he continued to move forward. It was as if she drew him; and soon,
in the pale moonlight and the wavering light of the furnaces, he could decipher
all the details of her face, and he saw that she was smiling fondly,
invitingly, admiringly, lustrously, with the old undiminished worship and
affection. And he perceived a dark discoloration on her right cheek, as though
she had suffered a blow, but this mark did not long occupy his mind. He thought
suddenly of the strong probability that her father would leave a nice little
bit of money to each of his three children; and he thought of her beauty, and
of her timid fragility in the tight black dress, and of her immense and
unquestioning love for him, which would survive all accidents and mishaps. He
seemed to sink luxuriously into this grand passion of hers (which he deemed
quite natural and proper) as into a soft feather-bed. To live secure in an
atmosphere of exhaustless worship--to keep a fount of balm and admiration for
ever in the house, a bubbling spring of passionate appreciation which would be
continually available for the refreshment of his self-esteem! To be always sure
of an obedience blind and willing, a subservience which no tyranny and no
harshness and no whim would rouse into revolt; to sit on a throne with so much
beauty kneeling at his feet!
And the possession of her beauty would be a source
of legitimate pride to him. People would often refer to the beautiful Mrs.
Woolley.
He felt that in sending May Deane to interrupt his
highly emotional conversation with May Lawton Providence had watched over him
and done him a good turn. May
And, moreover, the unfortunate episode of the
afternoon might have cooled her ardour to freezing-point.
He stood now in front of his worshipper, and the
notion crossed his mind that in after-years he could say to his friends: 'I
proposed to my wife at midnight under the moon. Not many men have done that.'
'Good-evening,' he ventured to the girl; and he
added with bravado: 'We've met before to-day, haven't we?'
She made no reply, but her smile was more
affectionate, more inviting, than ever.
'I'm glad of this opportunity--very glad,' he
proceeded. 'I've been wanting to…You must know, my dear girl, how I feel…'
She gave a gesture, charming in its sweet
humility, as if to say: 'Who am I that I should dare--'
And then he proposed to her, asked her to share
his life, and all that sort of thing; and when he had finished he thought,
'It's done now, anyway.'
Strange to relate, she offered no immediate reply,
but she bent a little towards him with shining, happy eyes. He had an impulse
to seize her in his arms and kiss her, but prudence suggested that he should
defer the rite. She turned and began to walk slowly and meditatively towards
the pit-shaft. He followed almost at her side, but a foot or so behind, waiting
for her to speak. And as he waited, expectant, he looked at her profile and
reflected how well the name May suited her, with its significances of shyness
and dreamy hope, and hidden fire and the modesty of spring.
And while he was thus savouring her face, and they
were still ten yards from the pit-shaft, she suddenly disappeared from his
vision, as it were by a conjuring trick. He had a horrible sensation in his
spinal column. He was not the man to mistrust the evidence of his senses and he
knew, therefore, that he had been proposing to a phantom.
5.
The next morning--early, because of Jim's early
breakfast--when May Deane's disappearance became known to the members of the
household, Jim had the idea of utilizing Carlo in the search for her. The
retriever went straight, without a fault, to the pit-shaft, and May was
discovered alive and unscathed, save for a contusion of the face and a sprain
in the wrist.
Her suicidal plunge had been arrested, at only a
few feet from the top of the shaft, by a cross-stay of timber, upon which she
lay prone. There was no reason why the affair should be made public, and it was
not. It was suppressed into one of those secrets which embed them-selves in the
history of families, and after two or three generations blossom into romantic
legends full of appropriate circumstantial detail.
Lionel Woolley spent a woeful night at his rooms.
He did not know what to do, and on the following day May Lawton encountered him
again, and proved by her demeanour that the episode of the previous afternoon
had caused no estrangement. Lionel vacillated. The sway of the schoolmistress
was almost restored, and it would have been restored fully had he not been
preoccupied by a feverish curiosity--the curiosity to know whether or not May
Deane was dead. He felt that she must indeed be dead, and he lived through the
day expectant of the news of her sudden decease. Towards night his state of
mind was such that he was obliged to call at the Deanes'. May heard him, and
insisted on seeing him; more, she insisted on seeing him alone in the
breakfast-room, where she reclined, interestingly white, on the sofa. Her
father and brothers objected strongly to the interview, but they yielded,
afraid that a refusal might induce hysteria and worse things.
And when Lionel Woolley came into the room, May,
steeped in felicity, related to him the story of her impulsive crime.
'I was so happy,' she said, 'when I knew that Miss
Lawton had deceived me.' And before he could inquire what she meant, she
continued rapidly: 'I must have been unconscious, but I felt you were there,
and something of me went out towards you. And oh! the answer to your
question--I heard your question; the real me heard it, but that something
could not speak.'
'My question?'
'You asked a question, didn't you?' she faltered,
sitting up.
He hesitated, and then surrendered himself to her
immense love and sank into it, and forgot May Lawton.
'Yes,' he said.
'The answer is yes. Oh, you must have known the answer
would be yes! You did know, didn't you?'
He nodded grandly.
She sighed with delicious and overwhelming joy.
In the ecstasy of the achievement of her desire
the girl gave little thought to the psychic aspect of the possibly unique
wooing.
As for Lionel, he refused to dwell on it even in
thought. And so that strange, magic, yearning effluence of a soul into a
visible projection and shape was ignored, slurred over, and, and, after ten
years of domesticity in the bank premises, is gradually being forgotten.
He is a man of business, and she, with her fading
beauty, her ardent, continuous worship of the idol, her half-dozen small
children, the eldest of whom is only eight, and the white window-curtains, to
change every week because of the smuts--do you suppose she has time or
inclination to ponder upon the theory of the subliminal consciousness and
kindred mysteries?
Tiddy-Fol-Lol.
It was the dinner-hour, and a group of ragged and
clay-soiled apprentice boys were making a great noise in the yard of Henry
Mynors and Co.'s small, compact earthenware manufactory up at Toft End. Toft
End caps the ridge to the east of Bursley; and Bursley, which has been the home
of the potter for ten centuries, is the most ancient of the Five Towns in
Staffordshire. The boys, dressed for the most part in shirt, trousers, and
boots, all equally ragged and insecure, were playing at prison-bars.
Soon the game ended abruptly in a clamorous
dispute upon a point of law, and it was not recommenced. The dispute dying a
natural death, the tireless energies of the boys needed a fresh outlet.
Inspired by a common instinct, they began at once to bait one of their number,
a slight youngster of twelve years, much better clothed than the rest, who had
adventurously strolled in from a neighbouring manufactory. This child answered
their jibes in an amiable, silly, drawling tone which seemed to justify the
epithet 'Loony,' frequently applied to him. Now and then he stammered; and then
companions laughed loud, and he with them. It was known that several years ago
he had fallen down a flight of stone steps, alighting on the back of his head,
and that ever since he had been deaf of one ear and under some trifling mental
derangement. His sublime calmness under their jests baffled them until the
terrible figure of Mr. Machin, the engine-man, standing at the door of the
slip-house, caught their attention and suggested a plan full of joyous
possibilities. They gathered round the lad, and, talking in subdued murmurs,
unanimously urged him with many persuasions to a certain course of action. He
declined the scheme, and declined again. Suddenly a boy shouted:
'Thee dars' na'!'
'I dare,' was the drawled, smiling answer.
'I tell thee thee dars' na'!'
'I tell thee I dare.' And thereupon he slowly but
resolutely set out for the slip-house door and Mr. Machin.
Eli Machin was beyond doubt the most considerable
employé on Clarke's 'bank' (manufactory). Even Henry Clarke approached him with
a subtly-indicated deference, and whenever Silas Emery, the immensely rich and
miserly sleeping partner in the firm, came up to visit the works, these two old
men chatted as old friends. In a modern earthenware manufactory the engine-room
is the source of all activity, for, owing to the inventive genius of a famous
and venerable son of the Five Towns, steam now presides at nearly every stage
in the long process of turning earth into ware. It moves the pug-mill, the
jollies, and the marvellous batting machines, dries the unfired clay, heats the
printers' stoves, and warms the offices where the 'jacket-men' dwell. Coal is a
tremendous item in the cost of production, and a competent, economical
engine-man can be sure of good wages and a choice of berths; he is desired like
a good domestic servant. Eli Machin was the prince of enginemen. His engine
never went wrong, his coal bills were never extravagant, and (supreme virtue!)
he was never absent on Mondays. From his post in the slip-house he watched over
the whole works like a father, stern, gruff, forbidding, but to be trusted
absolutely. He was sixty years old, and had been 'putting by' for nearly half a
century. He lived in a tiny villa-cottage with his bed-ridden, cheerful wife,
and lent small sums on mortgage of approved freeholds at 5 per cent.--no more
and no less. Secure behind this rampart of saved money, he was the equal of the
King on the throne. Not a magnate in all the Five Towns who would dare to be
condescending to Eli Machin. He had been a sidesman at the old church. A
trades-union had once asked him to become a working-man candidate for the
Bursley Town Council, but he had refused because he did not care for the
possibility of losing caste by being concerned in a strike. His personal
respectability was entirely unsullied, and he worshipped this abstract quality
as he worshipped God.
There was only one blot--but how foul!--on Eli
Machin's career, and that had been dropped by his daughter Miriam, when,
defying his authority, she married a scene-shifter at Hanbridge Theatre. The
atrocious idea of being connected with the theatre had rendered him speechless
for a time. He could but endure it in the most awful silence that ever hid
passionate feeling. Then one day he had burst out, 'The wench is no better than
a tiddy-fol-lol!' Only this solitary phrase--nothing else.
What a tiddy-fol-lol was no one quite knew; but
the word, getting about, stuck to him, and for some weeks boys used to shout it
after him in the streets, until he caught one of them, and in thirty seconds
put an end to the practice. Thenceforth Miriam, with all hers, was dead to him.
When her husband expired of consumption, Eli Machin saw the avenging arm of the
Lord in action; and when her boy grew to be a source of painful anxiety to her,
he said to himself that the wrath of Heaven was not yet cooled towards this
impious daughter. The passage of fifteen years had apparently in no way
softened his resentment.
The challenged lad in Mynors' yard slowly
approached the slip-house door, and halted before Eli Machin, grinning.
'Well, young un,' the old man said absently, 'what
dost want?'
'Tiddy-fol-lol, grandfeyther,' the child drawled
in his silly, irritating voice, and added:
'They said I darena say it to ye.'
Without an instant's hesitation Eli Machin raised
his still powerful arm, and, catching the boy under the ear, knocked him down.
The other boys yelled with unaffected pleasure and ran away.
'Get up, and be off wi' ye. Ye dunna belong to this
bank,' said Eli Machin in cold anger to the lad. But the lad did not stir; the
lad's eyes were closed, and he lay white on the stones.
Eli Machin bent down, and peered through his
spectacles at the prone form upon which the mid-day sun was beating.
'It's Miriam's boy!' he ejaculated under his
breath, and looked round as if in inquiry--the yard was empty. Then with quick
decision he picked up this limp and inconvenient parcel of humanity and
hastened--ran--with it out of the yard into the road.
Down the road he ran, turned to the left into
She was rather stout and full-bosomed, with a
fair, fresh face, full of sense and peace; she looked under thirty, but was
older.
'Here's thy Tommy, Miriam,' said Eli Machin
shortly. 'He give me some of his sauce, and I doubt I've done him an injury.'
The woman dropped her sewing.
'Eh, dear!' she cried, 'is that lad o' mine in
mischief again? I do hope he's no limb broken.'
'It in'na that,' said the old man, 'but he's
dazed-like. Better lay him on th' squab.'
She calmly took Tommy and placed him gently down
on the check-covered sofa under the window. 'Come in, father, do.'
The man obeyed, astonished at the entire
friendliness of this daughter, whom, though he had frequently seen her, he had
never spoken to for more than ten years. Her manner, at once filial and quite
natural, perfectly ignored the long breach, and disclosed no trace of
animosity.
Father and daughter examined the unconscious
child. Pale, pulseless, cold, he lay on the sofa like a corpse except for the
short, faint breaths which he drew through his blue lips.
'I doubt I've killed him,' said Eli.
'Nay, nay, father!' And her face actually smiled.
This supremacy of the soul against years of continued misfortune lifted her
high above him, and he suddenly felt himself an inferior creature.
'I'll go for th' doctor,' he said.
'Nay! I shall need ye.' And she put her head out
of the window. 'Mrs. Walley, will ye let your Lucy run quick for th' club
doctor? my Tommy's hurt.'
The whole street awoke instantly from its nap, and
in a few moments every door was occupied. Miriam closed her own door softly, as
though she might wake the boy, and spoke in whispers to people through the
window, finally telling them to go away. When the doctor came, half an hour
afterwards, she had done all that she knew for Tommy, without the slightest
apparent result.
'What is it?' asked the doctor curtly, as he
lifted the child's thin and lifeless hand.
Eli Machin explained that he had boxed the boy's
ear.
'Tommy was impudent to his grandfather,' Miriam
added hastily.
'Which ear?' the doctor inquired. It was the left.
He gazed into it, and then raised the boy's right leg and arm. 'There is no
paralysis,' he said. Then he felt the heart, and then took out his stethoscope
and applied it, listening intently.
'Canst hear owt?' the old man said.
'I cannot,' he answered.
Don't say that, doctor--don't say that! said
Miriam, with an accent of appeal.
'In these cases it is almost impossible to tell
whether the patient is alive or dead. We must wait. Mrs. Baddeley, make a
mustard plaster for his feet, and we will put another over the heart.' And so
they waited one hour, while the clock ticked and the mustard plasters gradually
cooled. Then Tommy's lips parted.
After another half-hour the doctor said:
'I must go now; I will come again at six. Do
nothing but apply fresh plasters. Be sure to keep his neck free. He is
breathing, but I may as well be plain with you--there is a great risk of your
child dying in this condition.'
Neighbours were again at the window, and Miriam
drew the blind, waving them away. At six o'clock the doctor reappeared. 'There
is no change,' he remarked. 'I will call in before I go to bed.'
'When he lifted the latch for the third time, at
ten o'clock, Eli Machin and Miriam still sat by the sofa, and Tommy still lay
thereon, move-less, a terrible enigma. But the glass lamp was lighted on the mantelpiece,
and Miriam's sewing, by which she earned a livelihood, had been hidden out of
sight.
'There is no change,' said the doctor. 'You can do
nothing except hope.'
'And pray,' the calm mother added.
Eli neither stirred nor spoke. For nine hours he had
absolutely forgotten his engine. He knew the boy would die.
The clock struck eleven, twelve, one, two, three,
each time fretting the nerves of the old man like a rasp. It was the hour of
summer dawn. A cold gray light fell unkindly across the small figure on the
sofa.
'Open th' door a bit, father,' said Miriam. 'This
parlour's gettin' close; th' lad canna breathe.'
'Nay, lass,' Eli sighed, as he stumbled obediently
to the door. 'The lad 'll breathe no more. I've killed him i' my anger.' He
frowned heavily, as though someone was annoying him.
'Hist!' she exclaimed, when, after extinguishing
the lamp, she returned to her boy's side. 'He's reddened--he's reddened! Look
thee at his cheeks, father!' She seized the child's inert hands and rubbed them
between her own. The blood was now plain in Tommy's face. His legs faintly
twitched. His breathing was slower. Miriam moved the coverlet and put her head
upon his heart. 'It's beating loud, father,' she cried. 'Bless God!'
Eli stared at the child with the fixity of a
statue. Then Tommy opened his eyes for an instant. The old man groaned. Tommy
looked vacantly round, closed his eyes again, and was unmistakably asleep. He
slept for one minute, and then waked. Eli involuntarily put a hand on the sofa.
Tommy gazed at him, and, with the most heavenly innocent smile of recognition,
lightly touched his grandfather's hand. Then he turned over on his right side.
In the anguish of sudden joy Eli gave a deep, piteous sob. That smile burnt
into him like a coal of fire.
'Now for the beef-tea,' said Miriam, crying.
'Beef-tea?' the boy repeated after her, mildly
questioning.
'Yes, my poppet,' she answered; and then aside,
'Father, he can hear i' his left ear. Did ye notice it?'
'It's a miracle--a miracle of God!' said Eli. In a
few hours Tommy was as well as ever--indeed, better; not only was his hearing
fully restored, but he had ceased to stammer, and the thin, almost
imperceptible cloud upon his intellect was dissipated. The doctor expressed but
little surprise at these phenomena, and, in fact, stated that similar things
had occurred often before, and were duly written down in the books of medicine.
But Eli Machin's firm, instinctive faith that
Miriam and Tommy now live in the villa-cottage
with the old people.
Death,
fire and life
1.
Mr. Curtenty lay in bed in the winter morning
darkness, and reflected upon the horrible injustice of destiny. Mr. Curtenty
was a most respectable gentleman--indeed, a connection of the celebrated Jos
Curtenty of Longshaw, and, be it admitted, a great deal more dignified than Jos
ever was. He had never done anything wrong; his conscience was sinless. In sixty
years his dignity and his respectability had not been ever compromised. He
could, and he did, look everybody unyieldingly in the face. By nature and long
practice he was intensely proud and independent. All the world addressed him as
"Mr." Once he had lost a situation through his employer omitting the
"Mr." Of course he had not openly resented the omission, for he was
not a fool, hut the omission had put him in a frame of mind favourable to
quarrelling, and a quarrel about some trifle had ensued. Nevertheless he had
soon obtained a new situation, which unhappily he had lost through the death of
the new employer.
Since that disaster--now rather more than a year
ago--he had been workless, and therefore wageless. Society seemed to blame him
for being sixty years old. The fact that he had no particular trade also
counted against him. He had always had posts such as watchman, doorkeeper,
timekeeper, inspector--posts which meant doing nothing with dignity. Hence no
doubt his feeling of superiority to people who actually did things.
Somehow he could scarce hide this feeling--even
from his daughter's husband, who secretly resented it. Jim Crowther was a young
miner living at Longshaw, and in the opinion of Mr. Curtenty, Jim's wife,
Harriet, had married beneath her. Mr. Curtenty was mistaken in supposing that
he had concealed this opinion from Jim and Harriet. Every week he disliked Jim
and Harriet more and more, because they were contributing to his subsistence.
They were not so crude in their methods of charity as to give him money direct.
Certainly not. Such clumsiness would have made an everlasting breach between
the two generations. Mr. Curtenty knew naught, officially, of any help. Only it
invariably happened that when Curtenty had not a shilling, Mrs. Curtenty had
ten shillings or so, which she produced as it were apologetically. Mr. Curtenty
was diplomatic enough never to inquire whence she had obtained the money.
Thus the twelve lean months had run precariously
and unsatisfactorily on.
But a crisis was now upon Mr. Curtenty. For his
wife had told him that Harriet had told her that Jim had told Harriet that Mrs.
Curtenty could go and live with the Crowthers at Longshaw if he liked, and Mr.
Curtenty too. And little by little Mr. Curtenty was given to understand that
either he must submit to this humiliation--or starve. Well, Mr. Curtenty had
his pride, and he swore to himself that he would not submit to it. He simply
could not imagine himself as a helpless pauper dependent in the home of his
son-in-law. He conveyed his decision to Mrs. Curtenty, and the next thing he
heard was that if he wouldn't go she would! He saw well enough that the notion
was to force him into submission! As if anybody could force him into
submission!
Two days previously, it being then a Wednesday,
Mr. Curtenty had been informed that Mrs. Curtenty would migrate to Longshaw at
the end of the week, Saturday. It was now Friday. The supreme catastrophe was
indeed shaping. All his life Mr. Curtenty had worried about the future, and his
relatives and acquaintances had laughed at him for worrying. But was he not
justified by the event? Had he ever been wrong? They twitted him about being
miserly. He was not miserly. He had always been careful, and was he not now
justified of his carefulness also? Financially, there was the matter of the
Post Office Savings Bank account. They did not positively accuse him of keeping
a private hoard in the Post Office Savings Bank; but they hinted at it, and no
amount of denials by him would stop their hints.
His ear caught a puffpuff-puffpuff, the
same being the first irregular coughings of the engine of Clayhanger's
Steam-Printing Works, which extended from Duck Bank down the opposite side of
the lane. These coughings were Mr. Curtenty's morning clock--he had no other,
nor watch either. Soon followed the sound of sirens from different parts of the
town of
In a dignified way he was sorry for his young and
ingenuous, quietly grumbling wife. Not really young, for she was the mother of
a mother! But he, at thirty, had married her at nineteen, and to him she had
always remained curiously young. There she lay, on the verge of fifty, and
looking to the impartial observer more than her age--she had had a wearing
life--but to him, in her tranquil, pathetic sleep, she seemed rather like a
girl, foolish, feckless, helpless. Yes, he was sorry for her . . . So she
intended on the morrow to migrate to her daughter's at Longshaw whether he went
or not? Unless he yielded she meant to leave him--leave him to his own devices.
It had come to that.
On the old tin tray was just enough bread, and
dripping, and bits of cured fish to last them till the next morning.
Thenceforward, the fiat had been issued from Longshaw, there were to be no more
supplies. And then what? He knew that his wife was wondering, and Harriet was
wondering, and Jim was wondering what the obstinate, secretive old man would
do--what would happen. He alone knew what would happen.
When he had laced his boots under the candle, and
combed his hair, he extinguished the candle and finished his toilet in the
dark. But the dark was now twilight; the earth was revolving as usual, and in
its revolution baring Bursley to the dawn. Mr. Curtenty buttoned his greenish
jacket, tied an antique woollen muffler round his collarless neck, put on his cap,
and went forth into
He knew he would be too early. He always was too
early. He paced smartly but with dignity about
"Good morning," said the genial postman.
"Good morning to you," said Mr. Curtenty
grandly; and took from the postman a small yellow official envelope.
In the privacy of the cottage stairs he opened the
envelope. Its contents were quite in order: an authority to withdraw the sum of
two shillings from the Savings Bank department of the Post Office. Then Mr.
Curtenty drew from his breast-pocket a yellowish bank-book, which showed that
twenty pounds stood to his credit, and he carefully put the withdrawal form
within the book and replaced the book in his pocket.
Surely you are not surprised? A prudent man must
have something up his sleeve for the last emergencies. Mr. Curtenty had
maintained that twenty pounds in reserve throughout a year of privation and
humiliation. He had lied about it for a year and more than a year. No matter
how terrible a plight you may be in, it is always possible to conceive yourself
in a still worse plight. That twenty pounds was Mr. Curtenty's bulwark against
the imaginable worse--the fear of which had plagued him for forty years. It was
the last defence and resource of his independence.
"Where ye been?" asked his waking wife,
as he re-entered their home.
"Getting a breath of air," said Mr.
Curtenty.
2.
In the evening, about half-past seven, Mrs.
Curtenty was lying in bed (for warmth) and Mr. Curtenty was sitting on one of
the two chairs, all in the dark, when Mr. Curtenty, after a little shuffling of
his legs and scrunching of the chair legs on the bare boards, suddenly rose and
felt his way to the door, where his cap and muffler hung on a hook. The pair
had had two lean meals and one snack; all the fish was eaten, but not quite all
the bread; some tea remained for breakfast. Mr. Curtenty had been abroad once,
in the afternoon, and during that period he had cashed the warrant for two
shillings. Whether or not his wife had gone out in the same interval he did not
know. They had scarcely spoken to each other, not from unfriendliness, but from
habit. Not a word had been said about the morrow, or Mr. Curtenty's intentions
regarding the morrow. Mrs. Curtenty had not dared to challenge him on the great
matter. Indeed, he could not safely be challenged.
Mrs. Curtenty thought to herself now, as she
sometimes remarked to her daughter:
"Things'll work themselves out if you leave
'em alone."
This was her philosophy in face of Mr. Curtenty's
terrible estranging dignity and independence. All she said was, as Mr. Curtenty
fumbled on the cheek of the door:
"Where ye going?"
And all he replied was:
"A breath of air."
He left without looking at the companion of his
life. Even if he had looked at her he could not have seen her in the darkness.
Still, he might have lit the last inch of candle for a few seconds and looked
at her, for the moment was one of farewell after a companionship of thirty
years. But his sentimental emotions had been numbed, frozen by misfortune, by
spiritual pride, by privation, by secretiveness, by hidden anger against fate,
and by self-righteousness. So he just went. He knew that his young wife would
fall asleep and stay asleep.
It was a raw night in
He had not meant to visit the Free Reference
Library in the Wedgwood Institution, but as a measure of precaution he decided
to do so. He was at home in that warm refuge of the unemployed, the Wedgwood
Institution. The horrid, stuffy, damp smell of the Reference Library delighted
his nose. After the usual formalities he obtained Quain's Dictionary of
Medicine, and, taking the thick volume to a desk, he turned over its pages with
the deliberate majesty of a vicar searching in the Bible for the lesson
appointed to be read.
His brain was absolutely clear. He was not out of
his mind, nor out of any part of his mind. In no circumstances would he migrate
to his son-in-law's. His wife might go; she indeed would go; and she would be
happy there, or at least contented. The twenty pounds (less two shillings)
which he had guarded for an ultimate contingency would be useless to him,
because too soon exhausted. He might of course fend for himself, all alone, for
a time on the twenty pounds; but if he did so his family would know for sure
that he had had a secret hoard after all, and he could not bear that
revelation; it would too seriously humiliate him. Moreover, when the twenty
pounds was gone--what then? Merely the same crucial, unanswerable problem as
now! No! He had had enough, and there could be but one answer to the question,
To be or not to be?
Quain was perfectly explicit: "The soluble
cyanides, more especially the cyanide of potassium, largely used by
photographers and by electro-platers, are common articles of commerce, and produce
the same deadly results as the acid itself. The fatal dose of prussic acid is
the equivalent of less than one grain of the anhydrous acid."
Nothing could be simpler to the understanding. He
had read it before, but he wished to refresh his memory and so avoid the
possibility of blunder. He refrained from proceeding to read about the effect
of the poison; he had read that also before; it was rather disturbing,
sensational.
He closed the stately tome and grandly handed it
back across the counter to the pert young thing in a jersey who had dominion
there. None could have guessed, as he calmly descended the broad steps of the
Institution, that he was solemnly marked out and divided that night from every
other soul in the town.
He made his way to Critchlow's in St. Luke's
Square. Critchlow was the oldest chemist in Bursley. He knew Critchlow
slightly--a sardonic and antique being who would as lief as not sell poison to
a customer who he guessed meant to drink it. Not that there was any trouble
about buying poisons in those distant days at the end of the nineteenth
century. You could pick a phial of tablets out of mahogany case and pay for it
and walk off with, for instance, as much sulphonal as would finish a whole
family--and no question asked and no eyebrow lifted. And if perchance Critchlow
should ask a question about "Scheele's Acid," the trade name of the
anhydrous prussic, Mr. Curtenty (who had never heard of sulphonal) could easily
refer to electro-plating; for he had once had a temporary job on a small electro-plating
works in Knype; hence his knowledge of the matter.
Critchlow's, however, was closed. Monstrous that
the shop should be closed on that night of all nights! Holl's clock across the Square
showed six minutes to eight, and Critchlow's had no right to be closed until
eight. But Critchlow's was closed. The old fellow was allowing himself to
become a bit capricious in his latter years.
Mr. Curtenty had purposely driven the transaction
as late as convenient, for he desired a deserted, nocturnal town for his mortal
work; but he now saw the possibility of having cut the thing too fine. Still,
there was Salter's, in the Market Place--all on the way to the empty
playground, beyond the Town Hall, which he had selected for his end. He walked
to the top of the Square, and turned to the right where the Market Place was.
He had an idea that Salter's kept open till nine o'clock. Salter's was open,
and he entered the shop, which happened to be empty behind the counter as well
as in front of it.
Salter's was the new chemistry in Bursley. Salter,
a daring and optimistic fellow from
A fine young gentleman, Mr. Salter, himself (no
apron), appeared from the dark backward of the establishment, glided along the
length of the counter, and became a note of interrogation to Mr. Curtenty,
whose tongue--very surprisingly--clave to his palate and whose throat grew
parched.
"I want some Scheele's Acid."
Mr. Salter stared at Mr. Curtenty, and Mr.
Curtenty, invigorated and challenged by the stare, returned it.
"Photographic work?"
Mr. Curtenty nodded. "Aye!"
"How much?"
"Dun' know. Smallish bottle."
"Half a pint?"
"Aye! That'll do."
"I'll get you to sign the poison book"
"Aye!"
Mr. Salter moved about behind the counter, and in
a startlingly brief space of time was slapping a salmon-tinted poison label on
a corked bottle. (Never within Mr. Curtenty's experience had seconds passed so
quickly.) The next instant he had screwed the bottle into a bit of
wrapping-paper, and he was in the act of handing it to Mr. Curtenty when a
great lady entered the shop and Mr. Salter turned to her with eager and yet
dignified deference, excusing himself negligently to Mr. Curtenty.
But Mr. Curtenty held the bottle. He held it
victoriously; and it was no longer a bottle in a bit of paper--it was a sacred
phial, magic, omnipotent, more powerful than man and than God. It held the key
to the riddle of the future, and the short answer to the arguments of the past.
It gave Mr. Curtenty a sense of absolutism, of independence, of dignity, of
conquest over earth, such as he had never had. It rendered Mr. Curtenty heroic,
magnificent. Already he was leaving earth. He had no interest in earth; he was
sick of it, disgusted with it. He yearned bitterly to be quit of it. He had
little or no fear, for fear presumes imagination, and he had little or no
imagination. He forgot the teachings of religion and the wrath of God, or, if
he remembered them, remembered them only to despise them. He was the supreme
egotist. He thought of nobody but himself. He was absorbed in himself. Some
faint vision of an inquest flickered transiently through his brain. He
sniggered at it and it vanished. He was triumphant. He was a hero, a conqueror,
a poet. He was God.-
"One-and-twopence, please," murmured Mr.
Salter, between two respectful sentences addressed to the lady.
"One-and-twopence!" cried Mr. Curtenty, dropping the florin
which he was holding suspended in mid-pocket. "One-and-twopence!
Why! It hadn't ought to be more than tenpence-halfpenny!"
"I'm afraid it's one-and-two," said Mr.
Salter, calmly.
"Not me!" Mr. Curtenty growled
with finality, and, dropping the bottle on to the round India rubber mat
intended to receive coins, he walked with fury and grandeur out of the shop,
not caring for forty Salters nor forty great ladies.
He muttered things to himself. Did Salter suppose
that he was going to help to pay for all the fal-lals and gimcrackery of
his new shop? Not him! They called him a miser and a skinflint. They might. But
fair was fair, and impudence was impudence. Impudence, that was what it was!
Impudence let Mr. Salter charge his one-and-twopences to them as had quarterly
bills and wouldn't pay cash. But not to him! He knew to a certainty that
Fresson the "cash chemist" in Hanbridge, the great price-cutter,
would sell him half a pint of Scheele's Acid for tenpence, if not
ninepence-halfpenny. And to Fresson's he would go. Fresson's did not close
until ten o'clock. Fresson was the friend of the poor, and a hard-working man
who toiled early and late. . . . Impudence! Impudence!
People passing in the Market Place heard and saw
Mr. Curtenty muttering and chuntering to himself. He noticed with resentment
that he was observed, and walked off in the direction of Hanbridge. His
resolution to carry out his plan was as firm as ever--for nothing could shake
it--but he was equally determined not to be done in the eye.
3.
He had to be content with the one great grievance
against Mr. Salter--Mr. Salter, who by his rapacity was forcing a determined
and desperate man to walk unnecessarily over to Hanbridge on a dank night.
Soon, by dint of reflection and savage concentration, the grievance swelled
till it filled his whole mind and heart and soul.
Nearly at the top of the hill, at Bleakridge,
As he passed the building Mr. Curtenty's
watchman's nose sniffed the air, in the manner of a tiger sniffing distant
blood. Mr. Curtenty became a nose and nothing but a nose; and his grievance and
his purpose were equally forgotten. It might be said that Mr. Curtenty had no
trade, but that he had a profession was richly demonstrated in that sniffing
moment. He sniffed the night-watchman's arch-foe--smoke, indicating fire.
He looked at the façade, whose upper windows were
still unglazed, and could see no curling wisp of smoke. But he had faith in his
nose. Though the gates of the large central archway had not yet been put in
place, the archway was stoutly boarded, and Mr. Curtenty could not get through
it. He ran along and climbed a rough fence at the side of the manufactory, and
so reached the back, which was less securely protected than the front from
marauders. The next instant he was in the strewn quadrangle, or
"yard" as it is called. And his nose was justified, for he saw smoke
meandering furtively, ominously, from a first-floor window. And his eyes
detected a faint glow within.
Mr. Curtenty was gloriously alive. The price of
Scheele's Acid was nothing to him. He was professionally inspired. He was happy
in the midst of calamity and conflagration. He knew the first thing to do and
the second thing to do, and did not hesitate a moment. In a quarter of a minute
he was in
The door opened.
"'Ere! You're in a 'urry," said a
stern., fat, middle-aged maid in cap and apron, as soon as she had satisfied
herself that Mr. Curtenty did not belong to the ruling class.
"'Ave ye got th' telephone here?" Mr.
Curtenty demanded stiffly.
"And if we have! You can't use it."
"Who wants to use it? You tell your master or
missus as Colclough's new pot-bank's afire, and they mun telephone for th' fire
brigade." And as the wench, startled and impressed and stricken, did not
immediately move, he added: "And look slippy!" Then he ran off.
Within the quadrangle of the works once more, he
descried in the darkness what looked like a mound of sand. He put his hand into
it. It was a mound of sand. Seizing one of several buckets which the builder's
men had left, he filled it with sand and searched for and found stairs and
gingerly mounted them in the black darkness, and guided by his triumphant nose
he passed through a corridor and into a large suffocating room, which room was
illuminated by the fire.
Planks of wood were just beginning to crackle.
With the sand he smothered their ardour. But there was not enough sand. He
descended again, with empty bucket, bungled the stairs, fell, hurt his ankle,
swore, limped, got more sand, ascended. After three such ascents he had
extinguished the fire and was in darkness. But he had seen enough to decide the
origin of the fire. The usual thing! Workmen's negligence. They had been
bivouacking in the room, they had made a fire in the grateless hearth--one of
your sprawling fires--and they had not put it out on leaving. A few embers had
reached a plank leaning at a broad angle against the mantelpiece, had patiently
attacked the root of the plank--a slow business, but in the end successful; the
plank, deprived of its base, had fallen sideways on to a heap of other planks.
And so on. Had not the entire place sweated with damp it might have been a heap
of ruins at the moment when Mr. Salter's rapacity had driven Mr. Curtenty in
the direction of Hanbridge.
Mr. Curtenty, his occupation gone, limped through
other corridors and rooms until he saw the light of
The expectant crowd in the mire was in due course
rewarded by the exciting arrival, from Hanbridge way, of a motor-car full of
people--Eddie Colclough, a young newly-married wife, and friends. Dr.
Ackerington being out, Mrs. Ackerington had telephoned not only to the fire
brigade, but to Eddie, who lived at Cauldon, between Hanbridge and Oldcastle.
Mr. and Mrs. Eddie were entertaining at dinner two gentlemen and a lady, and,
all being young and adventurous, they had instantly decided to leave dinner and
come in a body to the scene of the announced conflagration.
Mr. Curtenty, seeing them and guessing that Mr
Colclough must be among them, went downstairs with pain in his ankle. Eddie,
followed by Mrs. Eddie and the others, was in the quadrangle almost before him.
"Where's the fire?" Mr. Colclough
demanded fiercely, in bewilderment; he was intensely relieved to see no
evidence of a fire, but also--rather illogically--annoyed to see no evidence of
a fire.
"It ain't anywhere. I've put it out,"
answered Mr. Curtenty, coldly, challengingly.
"And who the devil are you, anyway?"
cried Mr. Colclough, who was of an aggressive and hasty disposition.
"Mr. Curtenty's my name," said Mr.
Curtenty, "and if you'll come upstairs I'll shownd ye a thing or two."
His tone gave pause to Mr. Colclough, and at the same time allayed Mr.
Colclough's rising suspicion of some hanky-panky in the rumour of the fire.
"Strike a match," ordered Mr. Colclough
at the dark stairs, feeling vainly in his pockets.
"I dunna' smoke," said Mr. Curtenty,
grimly.
However, one of the other gentlemen had one of the
new-fangled electric torches. The six of them stood in the scene of the
conflagration and heard Mr. Curtenty's description of the great episode: how he
was passing, how his nose gave the alarm, how he sent for the fire brigade, how
he used the sand, how he sprained his ankle, and how all's well that ends well;
the whole recital being supported by charred timber and the heavy odour of
wood-smoke.
The ray of the electric torch lighted Mr.
Curtenty's smoke-grimed face. The rest of them--the fashionable aristocracy,
including two young and beautiful women--were in shadow. Mr. Curtenty's tale
was faultless; it extorted admiration, a little unwilling perhaps at first from
Eddie Colclough, but spontaneous enough from the others, and especially from
the women.
"Well, here's something for you," said
Mr. Colclough, and handed Mr. Curtenty a sovereign.
"Thank ye"
"You must be used to fires," said Mrs.
Colclough smiling warmly.
Mr. Curtenty majestically offered some of his
personal history.
"And who are you working for now?" asked
Mr. Colclough.
"I'm playing [out of work]," said Mr.
Curtenty.
Mr. Colclough paused.
"What did you say your name was?"
"Mr. Curtenty."
"Well, look here, Curtenty," said Mr.
Colclough, and paused again, as though hesitating in his mind.
Mr. Curtenty did not repine at the rough careless
omission of the "Mr."; experience had been teaching him.
"Look here, Curtenty. There's no watchman
here yet. D'you want a job?"
Mr. Curtenty was engaged on the spot.
Suddenly he hurried from the room. The others
followed him. The electric torch lighted him from behind. His ears had been
copying the excellent example of his nose. He reached one of the front unglazed
windows and put his head through a square. A fire-engine had arrived with an
enormous fluster and bluster and glint of brass helmets. A fine effort on the
part of the Bursley Fire Brigade--forty minutes! Mr. Curtenty bawled angrily,
disdainfully, to the brigade:--
"It's out! Get away wi' yer
sprinklin'mashane! It's out! I'm a-telling on ye!"
Then he turned and faced the torch.
"You perfect duck!" exclaimed
young Mrs. Colclough, and carried away by gratitude for a great deed, and by
her youthful sentimentalism and the general influence of a honeymoon and the
comicality of Mr. Curtenty's dirty tweed cap--in all her beauty and all her
finery she put her ringed hands on the shoulders of the old man and kissed his
sooty plain face.
4.
In Duck Square (which is really only a bit of Duck
Bank and not a square at all) there is an establishment (not to be confused
with the Boro' Dining Rooms two doors off) which stays open till a late hour
nightly, brilliantly lit amid the surrounding gloom, and which exudes from its
interior an odour so appetising and powerful that it has been known to
interfere with the Wednesday evening prayer meeting in the Wesleyan chapel a
hundred yards away on the opposite side of Trafalgar Road.
Mr. Curtenty entered this establishment and,
pulling a florin from his pocket, bought two plenteous portions of the finest
fried fish. He then bought a candle, though candles were not in her line of
business, from the white-clad proprietress, who gave him a few matches into the
bargain. Then he went across to the fast-closing Dragon Hotel and in the nick
of time bought a bottle of beer. Having unlocked the door of the cottage in
Young Mrs. Curtenty was fast asleep; the blaze of
the candle did not awaken her. He examined her face with a new interest. His
heart was loudly beating (but that, of course, was the effect of the
stairs--what else could it be?). He was vaguely aware too, of a non-fleshly
throbbing, a quaking, a half-pleasant, half frightening general disturbance in
his mind or his soul or somewhere. He could not quite surely identify the
phenomenon. It might have been some imperfect realization of the dread fact
that but for the accident of a fire he would that that moment have been
elsewhere, or nowhere at all and nothing at all. On the other hand, it might be
due to alarm at his own wild and reckless expenditure in the fried-fish shop
and the Dragon Hotel.
It was the heavenly odour of the fried fish that
first caused his wife to dream a delicious dream and then woke her. As her
senses gradually brought her back into the sphere of reality, she opened her
ingenuous eyes and saw Mr. Curtenty bending over her, candle in hand. The
memory of Mrs. Colclough's kiss was now the chief thing in Mr. Curtenty's mind.
It somehow thrilled him, and it somehow took thirty years off Mrs Curtenty's
age.
"Rally thysen up, wench," said Mr.
Curtenty in a tone so startlingly new and attractive to Mrs. Curtenty that she
could not move.
He wanted to bend down and embrace her, but was
prevented by an unconquered complex that held him fast and told him not to be
ridiculous.
"Rally thysen up," he repeated,
"and put th' blanket round thy shoulders."
"Jimmy," said she, hopefully, "then
us'll go to Harriet's at Longshaw to-morrow?"
"Not me!"
"I shall," said she, sadly.
"They'll make me. Aye, lad, I'm going, I am!" She sighed.
"Thee isna'," he almost shouted.
"I've gotten a job. Rally up and set this 'ere fish on a platter."
She raised herself on her elbows and kissed him; she
had no forbidding complex. The kiss was what he wanted. This kiss was the
second in one hour, and the second in perhaps six months or more. And the lips
were as cool and fresh as Mrs. Colclough's. And the kiss had a quality
mysteriously surpassing that of Mrs. Colclough's.
Mr. Curtenty felt himself obliged for form's sake
to show impatience at the salute.
"'Ere," he grunted. "Thou'rt
shaking candle-grease all o'er th' bed."
Nevertheless, he himself adjusted the blanket
round his wife's exposed arms and neck.
The
limits of dominion
1.
Before the war, before the aerial mails, before
emperors had been cast from their thrones, before gold had been superseded by
paper, before empty dwelling-houses had come to be as rare and precious as
pearls, there was a row of sixty-one new small reddish houses on the east side
of the municipal park of Bursley in the Five Towns.
Exteriorly they were all alike, except that thirty
of them had the bay window to the left of the front door, while thirty-one had
the bay window to the right of the front door. The street was not grand enough
to look directly on the Park, but the houses had long if narrow gardens at the
back, with a fair open prospect of the colliery-strewn moors which enclose the
Five Towns. Interiorly many of the houses were alike, especially in temperament,
but some were different; and the most different of all and the most individual,
the most independent, the most efficient, the most successful, was number 41,
inhabited by the Furber family.
Dinah, the elder daughter, aged twenty-eight,
fair, buxom, placid, plain, was the housekeeper. She got up first, went to bed
last, and received no salary; when she wanted a little money for clothes--she
seldom wanted money for anything else--she had to ask for it, as for a favour.
Mary, the younger daughter, aged twenty-five, fair, golden, slim, pretty,
nervous, critical, too much aware of the frailties of human nature and the
risks of being alive, was a dressmaker's assistant, and earned twice what she
spent. Maidie, the cousin (really a second cousin), aged twenty-two,
red-haired, freckled, pretty, fiery, pugnacious, snub-nosed, was a mistress in
the
Last of the young generation came Ralph,
twenty-four, of medium height, stocky in figure, with brown hair and a stiff
brown moustache. He was extremely uncouth, rather nervous, very untidy, and
amazingly rude. He lived in the house like a wild animal, quarrelled fiercely
with cousin Maidie and quarrelled even with Dinah, who nevertheless was of a
notably pacific disposition; also he had dark, suppressed feuds with his
father; but he never quarrelled with querulous Mary, though she made no attempt
at all to placate him. Ralph was employed by the Five Towns Engineering
Company, Limited, which manufactured machinery for the earthenware works of
nearly the whole world, and for many collieries. It was known and admitted that
he was marvellous at machinery, and people said that he was, further, a
considerable organizer and that already he had performed various beneficial
wonders for the F.T.E.C. He existed solely for machinery and was entitled to be
called quite mad. He used the front room as a drawing office, and in such a
manner that the girls could not use it as a parlour without much preliminary
straightening up and grave family complications.
And he had bought a small decayed steam-engine and
renewed its youth and erected it in a shanty indescribably constructed of odds
and ends of wood, zinc, and iron in the garden. This engine actuated a lathe
and other contrivances. When steaming it coughed--a sort of hacking cough; and
the neighbours complained of it and even invoked the power of the Borough
Surveyor against it. Then you should haye seen how a family apparently
disunited can be united, welded and riveted together! The family defended
Ralph's steam-engine, which in private the girls detested, with ruthless
ferocity. Neighbours for forty yards on either side were alienated
magnificently for ever. The appeal to the Borough Surveyor failed. The family
spat out triumph on the resentful defeated. The victorious engine continued to
cough.
Over all the young generation stood the widowed
Mr. Furber: a workman of the old Five Towns school, with a short iron-filings
beard and no moustache; a trade unionist but a Conservative, despising all
nonsense about democracy. He was senior warehouseman in an earthenware
manufactory at Hanbridge, whither he went every morning by workmen's train from
the station by the Park. His uniform at work was shirt-sleeves and a flowing
white apron, and from an artisan's scorn of the "jacket" (apparel of
clerks and other futile persons) he preferred to be in shirt-sleeves even at
home. Mr. Furber was a broadminded man. He visited church and chapel impartially,
studying the variations of religious doctrine with a detached mind. He kept a
first-rate whippet and sometimes did a bit of coursing. But his chief delight
was football, on which subject he was omniscient. He read the accounts of the
matches every Sunday morning in the Sunday Chronicle, and the accounts
of the very same matches every Monday morning in the Athletic News.
Politics and crime he got from the evening Staffordshire Signal.
Father and son slept in the front bedroom. Dinah
and Mary slept in the back bedroom. Maidie slept in the cellule (styled a
bedroom) over the scullery.
Such was the industrious, prosperous, downright,
stern, independent, metallic island-home of the Furbers on the Park mound above
Bursley.
Now on a hot summer Saturday afternoon there was
an astonishing knock at the front door of No. 41. Mr. Furber, for whom summer
meant boredom through the absence of football, was reclining on his bed in
meditation. Dinah was cleaning the kitchen. Maidie was in her room mending a
glove. Mary was afield with a young man, for despite her hypercritical attitude
towards life she had admirers to choose from--and she chose. Dinah opened the
door, and when she opened it she blushed because the male visitor was obviously
a swell and because her hair was in irons.
"Good afternoon," said the visitor.
"Can I see Mr. Ralph Furber?" He had a
"I think he's in the engine-shed," said
Dinah, all of a flutter, wondering: "What's afoot with our Rafe?" She
added: "If you'll step through."
The visitor stepped through. The whippet in his
kennel growled.
"Ralph, you're wanted," cried Dinah, and
left the visitor alone to face Ralph and the whippet.
In a few seconds both Maidie and Mr. Furber were
acquainted with the remarkable and disturbing advent. Maidie and Dinah were
peeping out of Maidie's window. Mr. Furber was too proud and aloof to go
downstairs; but he leaned on one elbow with ears cocked. The whippet had had a
clout on the head from Ralph.
Fancy a swell calling to see Ralph! Ralph's
importance was increased tenfold in an instant. The household, richly confirmed
in its conviction of Ralph's unprecedented faculties, waited spellbound for the
sequel of the visit.
And it indeed had to wait. It was still waiting at
supper-time, eight-thirty. The impressive visitor had stayed nearly an hour,
and had then stepped through again, back to the front door, under Ralph's own
guidance; whereupon Ralph had returned to the engine-shed and been no more
seen.
Supper took place in the clean and tidy kitchen,
at the bare white deal table, under a gas-jet. It began punctually because both
Ralph and his father were punctual persons with imperious appetites. They ate
cold sausage and cheese and much bread, and drank a glass of beer apiece. The
girls were content with nibbles of cheese and bread, and drank water, or milk,
or milk-and-water. Mr. Furber and Ralph were in shirt-sleeves. Dinah wore her
housewife's apron. Maidie, as became a school-mistress, had no apron. Mary,
freshly arrived from the transaction abroad of affairs of the heart, alone was
dressed up. Ordinarily Mary would have been in a brooding, withdrawn state of
mind; but she was by far the most inquisitive member of the family, and her
curiosity had now been stimulated almost to exasperation by the murmured news
of Ralph's visitor.
However, she did not speak. Nobody spoke. It was
not the Furber habit to converse at meals. Meals were for eating, not chatter.
Unlike over-civilized and decadent people, the Furber family felt no
awkwardness in silence at table; indeed, it scorned mere small talk as being
insincere and affected politeness. Dinah, though she would gabble nineteen to
the dozen in private with the other girls, rarely said a word at meals. Mr.
Furber was uniformly taciturn. And the most taciturn of all was Ralph, whom
nothing but the need of something that he could not get himself, or the desire
to carry on an altercation, could rouse into speech. None, not even Mary, dared
cross-examine Ralph; being made of dynamite, he might have exploded and blown
the entire house to bits.
But something was bound to happen that evening. It
happened. Maidie, the red-haired, failed first in self-control.
"Of course we must be thankful if he leaves
us even a crust now--with his grand friends and all!" she snorted,
flushing and lifting her snub nose, as Ralph helped himself to two lumps of
cheese when there were only two lumps on the dish.
It was as if she had put a match to a time-fuse;
all waited for the bang. But no bang followed. Ralph--sleeves rolled up,
hastily washed face, black fingernails, rough hair--Ralph started and glowered,
then checked himself. For once in his life he was genuinely anxious to communicate
facts to his fellow creatures, and the opportunity had arrived.
"I never saw th' fellow before," he
said, with pride. "But his scheme is to set me up in business. There's a
works for sale at Longshaw. He's ready to buy it if I'll take it on, and he'll
find twenty thousand capital besides. And now ye know." He was careful not
to look at his father.
"Well I never!" gasped Mary.
"And what did ye say?" Maidie asked
challengingly, dangerously.
"I said, 'Who're ye codding of, mister?' That's
what I said. But he wasn't codding. He's going back to
"And should you be the boss of a great
big works?" Maidie demanded, with calculated incredulity.
"Yes, miss. I should be the boss."
With that Ralph suddenly rose, pushing his windsor
chair gratingly across the tiled floor, and passed into the front room. He was
too excited and triumphant to remain another moment with the family. He could
not bear the emotional tension of his triumph. The kitchen was scared by the
unbelievable magnitude of the event. The meal abruptly ended. No one could eat
any more.
"What about it, father?" Dinah asked
mildly.
Mr. Furber finished his beer, got up, and went to
bed, formidably mute.
The girls retired into the scullery, out of
earshot of Ralph, and chattered in whispers. They knew naught except what Ralph
had told them, and yet they managed quite easily to find subject matter for
more than an hour's glib, swift dramatic discussion of the terrific situation.
When Ralph, last of all, went to bed, leaving the
ground floor to dark night and the whippet (who slept in the scullery unless
under correction for sins), he found that his father had not put the candle
out. The ageing man, with heavy lower lip protruding, lay in wait for the son.
He brushed his beard from the back of it upwards into the air and said:
"What didst say to that there gentleman as
called?"
"Nothing," answered Ralph sullenly,
flinging off his boots with noise. "I said as I should speak to you about
it."
"And what need to speak to yer feyther about
it? Haven't ye got th' sense to settle it for yersen? What dost want to go into
business for? Ye're a workman and the son of a workman. I might ha' gone into
business on me own. Many an offer I've had. Lots wanted to be partners wi' me.
But would I? I've seen too many good workmen ruined by a bit o' capital. They
think they're going to turn th' town upside down, paying wages and keeping books
and fitting 'emselves out i' jackets and neckties, and going into th'
saloon-bar 'stead o' th' bar-parlour. And in six months there's writs out
against 'em. And then can they go back to an honest job? They can noa', and
they dunna, neither. Ye've got a good job at Fyden's." (Fyden's was the
old name of the F.T.E.C. before it became limited and grand.) "Ye mayn't
think it, but I can see ye earning ten pun a week at Fyden's afore ye're
thirty. Ten pun a week. And they'll give ye something for yer patents too--they'll
give ye a share. And no risk and no nonsense! And ye want to ask yer feyther
whether ye ought to chuck up a ten pun a week job for this skylarking wi'
somebody ye've never heard of--I wonder who's been stuffing him up with
a tale about you, my lad."
The son listened grimly as he undressed with
violent movements and draggings and pullings of serviceable raiment. The
harangue continued. It was the dour, obstinate expression of dying ideals, of
the artisan's deep and narrow pride and prejudice, of a conviction that labour
had a prestige surpassing that of capital. And it had the authority of Mr.
Furber's steady and successful life behind it, as well as the authority of a
father whose glance for thirty years had been sufficient to put his household
in a tremble.
Ralph's suddenly swollen pride was pricked. He saw
that he was nobody after all--or almost nobody. The great offer of the
afternoon might be marvellous, but it was silly--it was a flighty offer, the
offer of a flibbertigibbet in fine clothes. And also Ralph was secretly afraid
of the fearful responsibilities which would attend on acceptance of the offer.
And the habit of obedience to the respectable tyrant of the home was very
strong in him. Lastly he began to feel extremely young and diffident. And he
thought joyously what a "suck in" it would be for those chattering,
hysterical girls when he told them that he should decline the offer. Those
girls were no better than birds of the air. He would tell them curtly,
savagely. He would take the starch out of them with six words.
"Well," he said at length sharply to his
father, his nose in the pillow, "I don't know what ye're making all this
to-do about. I'm not for taking it on, and I never was for taking it on. But I
suppose I can mention it without having me head snapped off!"
A daring speech! (Also a lie! For he had certainly
intended to accept the offer.) He had had his head snapped off for far less in
the past. But even Mr. Furber would think twice before attempting to snap off
the head of a personage important enough to scorn such a dazzling offer as
Ralph was about to scorn.
The next Saturday afternoon everything was the
same as on the first Saturday. The warm, bright weather was the same. Ralph was
working in his garden "shop"; though expecting a swell he had from
pride made no change in his habits or dress; swells, he decided, must take him
as they found him; moreover, he was to treat the swell very curtly indeed; he
had a startler for the smell, who assuredly was not anticipating a refusal.
Dinah was in her kitchen, but this time her hair was not in irons. Mary was
afield in the land of tender sentiment. Maidie was in her bedroom mending not
gloves but stockings. Mr. Furber was lying on his bed; he had come home an hour
later than usual and had eaten no dinner.
The moment approached for the arrival of the
swell. Dinah, to pass the time, had left her kitchen to see whether Mr. Furber
was all right. It was as though the house itself awaited a crisis.
During the week not one word had been said by
Ralph or Mr. Furber to any of the girls about the mighty Ł20,000 offer.
Nevertheless the girls knew that Mr. Furber had ordained its refusal and that
Ralph would obey, and that nothing could possibly change his resolution, and
that still he hated to give a refusal, and despised himself. The girls were
profoundly disappointed. Maidie and Ralph had had a frightful quarrel because
in quite another matter she had accused him of being a miserable coward--and he
well knew to what she in her merciless feminine subtlety was referring. Those
two had not spoken to each other for three days, and were definitely in a state
of exacerbated mutual sulks.
Ralph was all the more annoyed, therefore, when
from his vibrating retreat in the garden he saw that Maidie and not Dinah was
showing the swell through the back door; the girl must have taken Dinah's place
simply from a mischievous desire to quiz the swell. A few seconds later--and
before the stranger had reached the engine-shed--Ralph saw the back door open
again and Maidie reappear.
"Rafe!"
He scowled.
"What is it?"
"I want you," cried Maidie in an
imperious tone.
He would have liked to kill her, but the presence
of the stranger prevented. He strode up the long garden, nodding brusquely to
the astonished visitor and passing him without a word.
"What is it, you vixen?"
"Your father's just died, in his sleep."
He saw Dinah weeping in the passage behind Maidie.
"Wait a minute," said Ralph, and,
turning, shouted to the swell:
"Hi!"
And then in a lower tone as they met:
"Summat's happened in th' house. I can't stop
to talk to ye now. But I'll take your offer. I'm ready to take it on--that is
if we can come to a proper arrangement."
Mr. Furber had been feeling queer for two days. He
was late for dinner because he had been to see his club doctor. But he had
confided in nobody at home.
Dinah and Maidie and Ralph stood in the bedroom
together. Maidie was about to run for a useless doctor.
"What will Mary say when she comes
home?" moaned Dinah, for Mary was passionately fond of her grim and
taciturn parent, and she was highly sensitive; to see his body there on the bed
might kill her. They were all three deeply shaken with emotion, and Ralph not
least.
But in his agitated heart Ralph could distinctly
hear himself muttering to himself:
"A near thing, that! A near thing, that. A
very near thing."
2.
Mr. Ralph Furber sat in his study on a Saturday
afternoon reading a very short letter. The study was a vast apartment, larger
than the whole of No. 41 where his father had died, and it was furnished in
mahogany and gilt and damask. Emperors had been cast from their thrones; yet
Ralph looked little older. He looked fiercer, and jollier.
The letter ran:
"DEAR RALPH,--We were all extremely
disappointed that you did not come down for Mary's wedding after all, and I
think you ought to be downright ashamed of yourself.--Yours, MAIDIE."
Mr. Furber frowned and glanced out at the gardens
which surrounded his mansion and the park which surrounded the gardens. She had
a nerve, that young woman had! He was not accustomed to being written to in
such a manner. He was accustomed to flattery and to his own way. He was an
exceedingly wealthy person. He had made himself rich and he had made others
rich too. He had not fought in the war, because the War Cabinet would not let
him fight; the War Cabinet had other work for him to do, and the work was of
such a nature that he could not help making money out of it, and a lot of
money. As an inventor and as an organizer he had had no superiors, and he had
developed a talent for most profitably investing the money which the Government
compelled him to acquire. He was popularly classed as a "profiteer,"
but he laughed at the epithet, knowing it to be unjust. Moreover, so far as he
was concerned, people might call him what they liked--he did not care. He knew
the reality of power and the value of his brain. He cared for nobody and for
nothing--except dominion and the wonders of his brain.
Not quite true. He cared for the letter; the
letter had pierced him like a dagger between two ribs. He ripped the letter to
pieces and employed language unworthy of a gentleman.
A girl was standing near him with a notebook in
her hand--one of his secretaries--but he behaved as though she did not exist.
"Anybody come yet?"
"Lady Eleanor Raysse and Sir Thomas Wrighton,
sir."
These were the advance-guard of his week-end
party; he had parties every week-end. His invitations were seldom refused; and
his curious deportment was cheerfully accepted by all because he was he.
"Tell that fellow Peter I shall want him to
play squash-rackets with me in half an hour." (Peter was a professional in
various games and attended to the athletic department at Wisden, and sometimes
drove a car or groomed a horse.)
"Yes, sir."
"Tell Chepter he's to take the Packard and
start off for the Five Towns at once. It's a hundred and seventy miles. He's to
be at Miss Maidie Furber's,
"Yes, sir. Do you know her number, sir? Or
perhaps they'll tell me at the Five Towns exchange."
"No, they won't. She hasn't got a
number."
"Then what had I better do, sir?"
"Better do? Get the Five Towns Hotel. Get old
Dolci. Tell him it's me, and ask him to send a message over to Hillport
instantly. Telegram wouldn't be certain to be delivered to-night. He'll do it.
Compose the message and make him write it down at the 'phone."
"Yes, sir."
Mr. Furber never wrote anything.himself, and
rarely even signed anything.
Lady Eleanor wandered into the room, although the room
was his den. Mr. Furber permitted, even encouraged, his week-end guests thus
freely to wander about, on the understanding that they did not expect sustained
attention until dinner. He had no objection to some of them listening--or
pretending not to listen--while he transacted business.
"Come back as soon as you've seen to that
car," he said to the secretary as she left the room.
Lady Eleanor was young, beautiful, and beautifully
dressed. She indeed had style, pedigree. She was the daughter of an earl, and
she had married the brother of a baron. It was impossible that any woman should
be as innocent as Lady Eleanor looked, and Lady Eleanor was not. She had seen
life. She had in fact had to get rid of the baron's brother. She was now free
again. Ralph, with his insight into human nature--of which he was secretly very
proud--knew that she would not be free for long. He admired her. She was so
slim, so lithe, so elegant, so expensive. She had such a quiet, tranquillizing
voice, and such a way of looking at a man--trustful, reassuring, appreciative
of man's strength. It was after all rather wonderful to Ralph that such a jewel
of a girl, who knew familiarly the whole of the great world, should be on
familiar terms with him. Ralph, the brother of Dinah who had married a jobbing
builder, and of Mary who had married a Prudential insurance agent, and whose
father used to eat in his shirt-sleeves in a house of which the rent was eight
shillings a week! He took her soft hand somewhat violently and she yielded it
touchingly to his violence.
"Had some tea?"
She nodded. "But not a cigarette yet."
He gave her a cigarette.
"So that affair's all over and settled
now?" he began, referring to the late proceedings against the baron's
brother.
She nodded again.
"Shall ye get yer costs out of him?"
"Heaven knows!"she exclaimed, with a
sigh and a smile. "I hear he's off to
They sat down side by side on the blue sofa in the
immense bow-window.
"Oh, how lovely the garden is!" she
murmured, turning her head. "It's so lovely it makes me want to cry. But I
dare say that's only because I'm so exhausted after this affair." She
laughed. What a voice! What a gentle laugh! You could scarcely hear it.
The secretary soon afterwards returned into the
room. Mr. Ralph Furber did not move from the sofa. He continued to talk in a
playful, rough tone to Lady Eleanor, and then suddenly he faced the standing,
respectful secretary with her notebook and began curtly and rapidly to give her
a long series of varied instructions, which she scribbled down, about the
electric light installation, the purchase of Treasury Bills, his new suits, a
hammock, champagne, a works dispute at Newcastle, etc. etc. He poured the
orders out of his mind in a continuous stream.
"And tell
The secretary departed once more, fully laden.
Lady Eleanor said:
"You know you'll never buy the Echo
for twenty-one thousand. It's the oldest-established evening paper in
"Cheap, is it? I know it's losing close on
thirty thousand a year. And I'm to pay twenty-five thousand for the privilege
of losing four hundred a week!"
"But you'd soon turn it into a paying
concern. Besides, you want a daily! Owning a paper would round you off.
I quite see that. You wouldn't get one that was paying its way for a quarter of
a million. Everybody says it's dirt cheap."
Ralph seized Lady Eleanor's hand and looked her in
the face loweringly.
"Listen to me, Lady Eleanor," he said,
with a mixture of grimness, cynicism, and benevolence. "You're going to
get a commission out of Steinheil if that paper is sold to me for more than
twenty-one thousand."
"Why do you say such a thing?"
"Because it just came into my head, that's
all. I shouldn't be surprised if he's offered you half of everything over
twenty-one thousand. It's quite all right. Business is business." He
laughed indulgently, as at a rather mediocre joke.
A deep blush spread over Lady Eleanor's cheeks and
down to her neck and throat.
Ralph jumped to his feet.
"Then I guessed right," he exclaimed
savagely, and then burst into a roar of laughter.
"Listen here. I won't give Steinheil more than
twenty-one. But I'll make you a present of two and a half thousand--for your
trouble."
"You're terrible. You're the most terrible
man in the world. . . . I have to live. You know how extravagant I am. I can't
help it, can I?"
Lady Eleanor wept.
There was an irruption of guests into the room,
headed by Sir Thomas. Lady Eleanor sprang from the sofa, threw her cigarette
into a bowl, and rushed pell-mell through the open french window into the
garden. She was holding her hands to her face, and between her hands cataracts
of laughter seemed to escape. But only Ralph knew that it was hysterical
laughter.
"What's the fun, Rafy?" Sir Thomas
demanded gaily.
"Go and change, Tommy," said Mr. Furber.
"And I'll take you on at squash-rackets for a flyer."
3.
"But I thought you were ill?"
This exclamation came from Maidie as she stepped
out of the Packard on the following afternoon, Sunday. The whole of the
week-end party was trailing into the house for tea, after various games and
distractions. And the week-end party seemed to Maidie to be alarmingly
distinguished, smart, fashionable, Londony, and sure of itself. The women
thereof intimidated her. Lady Eleanor, shining in white, instantly aroused in
her an irrational, unchristian, acute antipathy. The week-end party thought
that Maidie must be some secretarial messenger arriving with important news
bearing on the host's private affairs, and it passed on through the inner and
the outer halls into the big drawing-room.
"Why did ye think I was ill?" asked
Ralph, ignoring completely all his other guests.
"Well, I couldn't think why else ye should
send for me. I asked the chauffeur, but he didn't seem to know much about you.
I certainly shouldn't have come if I hadn't thought you were ill."
"I wanted to see ye."
"Oh, my!" she murmured involuntarily,
gazing at the formidable double staircase which rose grandly bifurcating out of
the main hall. She was out-faced by the splendour, and the result of her fright
was that she became brusque, hostile and hedgehog-like. Ralph Furber reflected
quickly.
"Which room is Miss Furber in?" he
questioned the attendant butler.
"The Regency room, sir."
"Find Miss Hummel and ask her to go up there
at once."
"Very good, sir."
Miss Hummel was the factotum secretary who took
notes and whose entire existence was devoted to the great autocrat. He had
decided that Miss Hummel and Maidie stood a chance of "getting on"
together.
"Am I supposed to sleep here?"
asked Maidie, in the glittering Regency bedroom to which Ralph had personally
conducted her. She had never before had the opportunity of witnessing Ralph's
way of life. She knew he was a millionaire, but she had not imagined the state
of being a millionaire. She had the sensation of having stepped somehow into
the unreal pages of a novel.
"But who were all those people
downstairs?"
"Oh, just a job lot here for the
week-end."
"But who?"
He mentioned some names.
"Well, I'm not going down to have my tea with
them folk, and so you needn't think it, Ralph Furber!"
"All right, silly! All right! " he
agreed testily.
In spite of his unique and disconcerting manners
to friends, Ralph thought he had cast off most of his old Five Towns
peculiarities. Perhaps he had. But in the presence of Maidie they all seemed to
come back again. There she sat, the very symbol of the Five Towns, with her red
hair, her freckled face, her snub nose, and her no-nonsense attitude. Dowdy,
constrained, nervous, utterly provincial, she was yet sturdy enough in her mind
to repudiate all "them folk" downstairs. So much so that Ralph
actually felt somewhat ashamed of knowing them and having them in his house. He
felt apologetic even for the house itself. He felt that in putting on grandeur
he had somehow betrayed the rugged ideals of the Five Towns.
And she had only come because she had thought he
was ill! . . . The goods! The stuff! That was what she was, the vixen! Being a
realist, he admitted to himself that if he persuaded her to go to the
drawing-room and be introduced to his job lot, he should be ashamed of her--do
what he would. And yet he admired the girl, confound her! Miss Hummel appeared,
and, worried, he left the two young women to make acquaintance.
"Mr. Furber's compliments, and he hopes
you'll begin dinner without him, as he has just had a very urgent message from town
which must be attended to immediately." Thus the butler to the assembled
drawing-room when the dinner-gong had sounded.
And upstairs, in a little sitting-room which had
somehow got mislaid among the bedrooms, Maidie and Miss Hummel were hovering
expectantly round a table laid for two when Ralph, whom they were certainly not
expecting, seemed to pounce tigerishly upon them, and at a hardly perceptible
sign from him Miss Hummel departed, in search of another dinner elsewhere in
the house.
"I'm going to eat up here with you,"
said Ralph.
"But what about the people downstairs?"
"Hang 'em! I've got to talk to you."
"D'ye always have dinner at this time?"
"Yes. Usual time."
"Ye know very well it isn't. And do ye always
put on evening dress?"
"Well, it's evening, isn't it?"
"I don't think much of yer laundry. I could
get up a starched shirt better than that myself."
"Ye think ye could."
He winked as he examined her anew. It seemed to
him that she positively had not changed. The same slimness, the same fresh if freckled
complexion, the same bright, girlish, bold, fighting and yet innocent glance.
Difficult to believe that she was past thirty. How different she was from the
women downstairs! He thought, in his instinctive partiality for the place of
his origin:
"There's something in her that the
others haven't got."
Before the parlourmaid who served them could bring
the finger-bowls he abruptly told her to go--partly because he feared that
Maidie might silently and witheringly sneer at the notion of him, Ralph Furber,
employing finger-bowls. He thought of the old suppers in the parlour of the
cottage by the municipal park.
"So ye think I ought to be 'downright
ashamed' o' myself," said Ralph, quoting suddenly from her letter to him.
"Mary was most frightfully hurt, and ashamed
too. . . . As if you despised her. . . . Too grand, now, to come to your own
sister's wedding! . . . .And crying off at the last moment, tool" Maidie's
voice was hard, and the glint of her eyes was hard. None of the ladies
downstairs would have dared to stand up to him as Maidie was doing. Not one!
They all, whatever their lineage, kowtowed to him when it came to the point. He
saw that Maidie would need handling.
"Listen here," he said, subduing his
natural harshness of tone. "I sent for ye because I was very anxious for
ye not to think wrong about me."
"Yes," she interrupted him, in quite her
old manner, "that's just like ye, that is. You think everyone's at your
beck and call, you do. You always did. And I'm brought all the way down
here to be put in my place and made to feel small. You're a snob, and you know
it, but you want to make us believe you aren't. Well, you can't do it."
Mr. Furber achieved marvels of self-control.
"Listen here," his voice sank nearly to
a murmur. "I'm telling ye I really couldn't come. I've got very important
interests. Very important. I sh'd doubt if you realize how important--"
"I don't care what your 'interests' are. You
haven't got any interests as important as Mary's wedding was to Mary. She
expected to be married ten years ago and she ought to have been. Run after as
she was! And at last it comes off, and you were to give her away and all. And
you throw her over and she has to be given away by that stupid old Ezra."
(Ezra was Dinah's husband.) "And it was a scandalous shame. You're the
head of the family still, even if you do have lords and ladies and things at
your precious week-end parties. I suppose you'll say you gave Mary a thousand
pounds for a wedding present. If I'd been her I'd have ripped the cheque in half
and sent it back to you in an unstamped envelope. That I would! You're a
disgusting snob. And you think everybody's afraid of you and you can do what
you like and we shall all lick your boots. Not a bit of it, my lad! And I'll
thank you to send me to the station early to-morrow as I'm going back by train,
if you please. You aren't the only independent person in the
world."
At this point Mr. Furber picked up his finger-bowl
and dashed it on to the carpet, water and all. He let himself go. Hammer and
tongs were personified with astounding vigour in the little sitting-room. A
report of the dialogue between the hammer and the tongs would not be edifying,
but it constituted a great scene in the finest tradition of the Five Towns. It
was interfered with by the sound of the gramophone from the hall. A fox-trot.
The week-end party was solacing itself for the absence of the host in a dance.
Silence fell between the second cousins. Then Mr. Furber left the room. Leaning
over the rail of the corridor he saw the heads of the dancers below. Lady
Eleanor ran up to him and leaned over by his side.
"I know you hate me," she said in a low,
poignant tone, while maintaining a rapid smile for the benefit of the upward
public gaze. "I know you've done with me. But if you only knew how
I--"
"I don't hate yer," he answered. "I
admire you for that commission idea. Business is business. Don't forget I'm a
businessman myself. Why shouldn't you have made a bit out of the sale of this
paper? You shall. Go downstairs again now."
"But I must talk to you to-night. I must
explain myself. You must let me defend myself. Meet me in the kiosk at eleven.
I'll slip out. I shall expect you.'
She glided down the stairs. He watched her. She
was indeed highly ornamental. What an ornament for a rich man's home! How
intensely feminine.
"She's got me," he reflected. "She
was going to make a commission out of me. And I've forgiven her, and she's got
me. Kiosk, eh!"
It was a relief to him to admit to himself that he
was at last caught.
"Anyhow she adores me."
His ear caught a strange sound. It came along the
corridor as from a distance. It reminded him of the distant gigantic breathing
of the great blast furnaces over at Cauldon in the Five Towns. Only it was
very, very faint. He went towards it. It came from the little sitting-room. It
was Maidie sobbing with singular regularity. Her auburn head lay on the table
and her arms round it amid the debris of the meal. He shut the door and
approached the auburn head anxiously, hoping that he alone had heard the sound.
"This is the second woman I've reduced to tears to-day," he thought
grimly. He bent over Maidie. She ceased to cry. Her eyes glistened wet.
"Here, listen here!" he said. "I
was wrong not to go to that dashed wedding. But ye've been saying a lot of very
wicked things. And ye know ye have. Very unjust. But ye can't control yerself.
Never could. And why aren't you married, I should like to know! . . .
Fellows are afraid of you. But I'm not. I'm not. At least I don't think I
am."
She smiled pitifully.
"Now why am I kissing her?" he asked
himself as he kissed her. No, she did not draw back. She let him kiss her fair
and square. And the terrible strangeness and mystery of destiny shook him. For
he was a man who could comprehend and appreciate big things.
"A near thing, that!" he said to
himself. "An hour later, half an hour later, and I should ha' been--"
Thus he reflected as he went out to give exactly
two minutes to Lady Eleanor in the kiosk. He was armed now against the weapons
of Lady Eleanor in the slimmer night.
On the first day of his ownership of The
Charing Cross Echo appeared therein an announcement of his marriage
(ceremony strictly private) to Maidie Furber, daughter of the late, etc. etc.
The
tiger and the baby
1.
George Peel and Mary, his wife, sat down to
breakfast. Their only son, Georgie, was already seated. George the younger
showed an astounding disregard for the decencies of life, and a frankly
gluttonous absorption in food which amounted to cynicism. Evidently he cared
for nothing but the satisfaction of bodily desires. Yet he was twenty-two
months old, and occupied a commanding situation in a high chair! His father and
mother were aged thirty-two and twenty-eight respectively. They both had pale,
intellectual faces; they were dressed with elegance, and their gestures were
the gestures of people accustomed to be waited upon and to consider luxuries as
necessaries. There was silver upon the table, and the room, though small and
somewhat disordered, had in it beautiful things which had cost money. Through a
doorway half-screened by a portičre could be seen a large studio peopled with
heroic statuary, plaster casts, and lumps of clay veiled in wet cloths. And on
the other side of the great window of the studio green trees waved their
foliage. The trees were in Regent's Park. Another detail to show that the Peels
had not precisely failed in life: the time was then ten-thirty o'clock!
Millions of persons in
And indeed George Peel was not merely a young
sculptor of marked talent; he was also a rising young sculptor. For instance,
when you mentioned his name in artistic circles the company signified that it
knew whom you meant, and those members of the company who had never seen his
work had to feel ashamed of themselves. Further, he had lately been awarded the
Triennial Gold Medal of the International Society, an honour that no Englishman
had previously achieved. His friends and himself had, by the way, celebrated
this dazzling event by a noble and joyous gathering in the studio, at which
famous personages had been present.
Everybody knew that George Peel, in addition to
what he earned, had important "private resources." For even rising
young sculptors cannot live luxuriously on what they gain, and you cannot eat
gold medals. Nor will gold medals pay a heavy rent or the cost of manual help
in marble cutting. All other rising young sculptors envied George Peel, and he
rather condescended to them (in his own mind) because they had to keep up
appearances by means of subterfuges, whereas there was no deception about his
large and ample existence.
On the table by Mary's plate was a letter, the sole
letter. It had come by the second post. The contents of the first post had been
perused in bed. While Mary was scraping porridge off the younger George's bib
with a spoon, and wiping porridge out of his eyes with a serviette, George the
elder gave just a glance at the letter.
"So he has written after all!" said
George, in a voice that tried to be nonchalant.
"Who?" asked Mary, although she had
already seen the envelope, and knew exactly what George meant. And her voice
also was unnatural in its attempted casualness.
"The old cock," said George, beginning
to serve bacon.
"Oh!" said Mary, coming to her chair,
and beginning to dispense tea.
She was dying to open the letter, yet she poured
out the tea with superhuman leisureliness, and then indicated to Georgie
exactly where to search for bits of porridge on his big plate, while George
with a great appearance of calm unfolded a newspaper. Then at length she did
open the letter. Having read it, she put her lips tighter together, nodded, and
passed the letter to George. And George read:
"DEAR MARY,--I cannot accede to your
request.--Your affectionate uncle,
SAMUEL PEEL.
"P.S.--The expenses connected with my County Council
election will be terrible.
S. P."
George lifted his eyebrows, as if to indicate that
in his opinion there was no accounting for the wild stupidity of human nature,
and that he as a philosopher refused to be startled by anything whatever.
"Curt!" he muttered coldly. Mary
uneasily laughed.
"What shall you do?" she inquired.
"Without!" replied George, with a
curtness that equalled Mary's uncle's.
"And what about the rent?"
"The rent will have to wait."
A brave young man! Nevertheless he saw in that
moment chasms at his feet--chasms in which he and his wife and child and his
brilliant prospects might be swallowed up. He changed the subject.
"You didn't see this cutting," he said,
and passed a slip from a newspaper gummed to a piece of green paper.
George, in his quality of rising young sculptor,
received Press cuttings from an agency. This one was from a somewhat vulgar
Society journal, and it gave, in two paragraphs, an account of the recent
festivity at George's studio. It finished with the words: "Heidsieck
flowed freely." He could not guess who had written it. No! It was not in
the nicest taste, but it furnished indubitable proof that George was still
rising, that he was a figure in the world.
"What a rag!" he observed, with an
expression of repugnance. "Read by suburban shop-girls, I suppose."
2.
George had arranged his career in a quite exceptional
way. It is true that chance had served him; but then he had known how to make
use of chance to the highest advantage. The chance that had served him lay in
the facts that Mary Peel had fallen gravely in love with him, that her sole
surviving relative was a rich uncle, and that George's surname was the same as
hers and her uncle's. He had met niece and uncle in Bursley in the Five Towns,
where old Samuel Peel was a personage, and, timidly, a patron of the arts.
Having regard to his golden hair and affection-compelling appearance, it was
not surprising that Mary, accustomed to the monotony of her uncle's house, had
surrendered her heart to him. And it was not surprising that old Peel had at
once consented to the match, and made a will in favour of Mary and her
offspring. What was surprising was that old Peel should have begun to part with
his money at once, and in large quantities, for he was not of a very
open-handed disposition.
The explanation of old Samuel Peel's generosity
was due to his being a cousin of the Peels of Bursley, the great
eighteenth-century family of earthenware manufacturers. The main branch had
died out, the notorious Carlotta Peel having expired shockingly in Paris, and
another young descendant, Matthew, having been forced under a will to alter his
name to Peel-Swynnerton. So that only the distant cousin, Samuel Peel, was
left, and he was a bachelor with no prospect of ever being anything else. Now
Samuel had made a fortune of his own, and he considered that all the honour and
all the historical splendours of the Peel family were concentrated in himself.
And he tried to be worthy of them. He tried to restore the family traditions.
For this he became a benefactor to his native town, a patron of the arts, and a
candidate for the Staffordshire County Council. And when Mary set her young
mind on a young man of parts and of ambition, and bearing by hazard the very
same name of Peel, old Samuel Peel said to himself: "The old family name
will not die out. It ought to be more magnificent than ever." He said this
also to George Peel.
Whereupon George Peel talked to him persuasively
and sensibly about the risks and the prizes of the sculptor's career. He
explained just how extremely ambitious he was, and all that he had already
done, and all that he intended to do. And he convinced his uncle-in-law that
young sculptors were tremendously handicapped in an expensive and difficult
profession by poverty or at least narrowness of means. He convinced his
uncle-in-law that the best manner of succeeding was to begin at the top, to try
for only the highest things, to sell nothing cheaply, to be haughty with
dealers and connoisseurs, and to cut a figure in the very centre of the
art-world of
This had occurred when George was twenty-five.
Matters fell out rather as George had predicted.
The youth almost at once obtained a commission for three hundred pounds' worth
of symbolic statues for the front of the central offices of the Order of
Rechabites, which particularly pleased his uncle, because Samuel Peel was a
strong temperance man. And George got one or two other commissions.
Being extravagant was to George Peel the same
thing as "putting all the profits into the business" is to a
manufacturer. He was extravagant and ostentatious on principle, and by
far-sighted policy--or, at least, he thought that he was.
And thus the world's rumours multiplied his
success, and many persons said and believed that he was making quite two
thousand a year, and would be an A.R.A. before he was grey-haired. But George
always related the true facts to his uncle-in-law; he even made them out to be
much less satisfactory than they really were. His favourite phrase in letters
to his uncle was that he was "building," "building "--not
houses, but his future reputation and success.
Then commissions fell off or grew intermittent, or
were refused as being unworthy of George's dignity. And then young Georgie
arrived, with his insatiable appetites and his vociferous need of doctors,
nurses, perambulators, nurseries, and lacy garments. And all the time young
George's father kept his head high and continued to be extravagant by
far-sighted policy. And the five hundred a year kept coming in regularly by
quarterly instalments. Many a tight morning George nearly decided that Mary
must write to her uncle and ask for a little supplementary estimate. But he
never did decide, partly because he was afraid, and partly from sheer pride.
(According to his original statements to his uncle-in-law, seven years earlier,
he ought at this epoch to have been in an assured position with a genuine
income of thousands.)
But the state of trade worsened, and he had a
cheque dishonoured. And then he won the Triennial Gold Medal. And then at
length he did arrange with Mary that she should write to old Samuel and roundly
ask him for an extra couple of hundred. They composed the letter together; and
they stated the reasons so well, and convinced themselves so completely of the
righteousness of their cause, that for a few moments they looked on the two
hundred as already in hand. Hence the Heidsieck night. But on the morrow of the
Heidsieck night they thought differently. And George was gloomy. He felt
humiliated by the necessity of the application to his uncle--the first he had
ever made. And he feared the result.
His fears were justified.
3.
They were far more than justified. Three mornings
after the first letter, to which she had made no reply, Mary received a second.
It ran:
"DEAR MARY,--And what is more, I shall
henceforth pay you three hundred instead of five hundred a year. If George has
not made a position for himself it is quite time he had. The Gold Medal must
make a lot of difference to him. And if necessary you must economize. I am sure
there is room for economy in your household.
"P.S.--I am, of course, acting in your best interests.
"S. P."
This letter infuriated George, so much so that
George the younger, observing strange symptoms on his father's face, and strange
sounds issuing from his father's mouth, stopped eating in order to give the
whole of his attention to them.
"
"I expect he's been reading that paper,"
said Mary.
"Do you mean to say," George asked
scornfully, "that your uncle reads a rag like that? I thought all his
lot looked down on worldliness."
"So they do," said Mary. "But
somehow they like reading about it. I believe uncle has read it every week for
twenty years."
"Well, why didn't you tell me?"
"The other morning?"
"Yes."
"Oh, I didn't want to worry you. What good
would it have done?"
"What good would it have done!" George
repeated in accents of terrible disdain, as though the good that it would have
done was obvious to the lowest intelligence. (Yet he knew quite well that it
would have done no good at all.) "Georgie, take that spoon out of your
sleeve."
And Georgie, usually disobedient, took the
porridge-laden spoon out of his sleeve and glanced at his mother for moral
protection. His mother merely wiped him rather roughly. Georgie thought, once
more, that he never in this world should understand grown-up people. And the
recurring thought made him cry gently.
George lapsed into savage meditation. During all
the seven years of his married life he had somehow supposed himself to be
superior, as a man, to his struggling rivals. He had regarded them with easy
toleration, as from a height. And now he saw himself tumbling down among them,
humiliated. Everything seemed unreal to him then. The studio and the
breakfast-room were solid; the waving trees in Regent's Park were solid; the
rich knick-knacks and beautiful furniture and excellent food and fine clothes
were all solid enough; but they seemed most disconcertingly unreal. One letter
from old Samuel had made them tremble, and the second had reduced them to
illusions, or delusions. Even George's reputation as a rising sculptor appeared
utterly fallacious. What rendered him savage was the awful injustice of Samuel.
Samuel had no right whatever to play him such a trick. It was, in a way, worse
than if Samuel had cut off the allowance altogether, for in that case he could
at any rate have gone majestically to Samuel and said: "Your niece and her
child are starving." But with a minimum of three hundred a year for their
support three people cannot possibly starve.
"Ring the bell and have this kid taken
out," said he.
Whereupon Georgie yelled.
Kate came, a starched white-and-blue young thing
of sixteen.
"Kate," said George, autocratically,
"take baby."
"Yes, sir," said Kate, with respectful
obedience. The girl had no notion that she was not real to her master, or that
her master was saying to himself: "I ought not to be ordering human beings
about like this. I can't pay their wages. I ought to be starving in a
garret."
When George and Mary were alone, George said:
"Look here! Does he mean it?"
"You may depend he means it. It's so like
him. Me asking for that Ł200 must have upset him. And then seeing that about
Heidsieck in the paper--he'd make up his mind all of a sudden--I know him so
well."
"H'm!" snorted George. "I shall
make my mind up all of a sudden, too!"
"What shall you do?"
"There's one thing I shan't do," said
George. "And that is, stop here. Do you realize, my girl, that we shall be
absolutely up a gum-tree?"
"I should have thought you would be
able--"
"Absolute gum-tree!" George interrupted
her. "Simply can't keep the shop open! To-morrow, my child, we go down to
Bursley."
" Who?"
"You, me, and the infant."
"And what about the servants?"
"Send 'em home."
"But we can't descend on uncle like that
without notice, and him full of his election! Besides, he's cross."
"We shan't descend on him."
"Then where shall you go?"
"We shall put up at the Tiger," said
George, impressively.
"The Tiger?" gasped Mary.
George had meant to stagger, and he had staggered.
"The Tiger," he iterated.
"With Georgie?"
"With Georgie."
"But what will uncle say? I shouldn't be
surprised if uncle has never been in the Tiger in his life. You know his
views--"
"I don't care twopence for your uncle,"
said George, again implicitly blaming Mary for the peculiarities of her uncle's
character. "Something's got to be done, and I'm going to do it."
4.
Two days later, at about ten o'clock in the
morning, Samuel Peel, J.P., entered the market-place, Bursley, from the top of
And as, nearly opposite that celebrated hotel, the
Tiger, he was about to cross over to the eastern porch of the Town Hall, he saw
a golden-haired man approaching him with a perambulator. And the sight made him
pause involuntarily. It was a strange sight. Then he recognized his
nephew-in-law. And he blanched, partly from excessive astonishment, but partly
from fear.
"How do, uncle?" said George,
nonchalantly, as though he had parted from him on the previous evening.
"Just hang on to this pram a sec., will you?" And, pushing the
perambulator towards Samuel Peel, J.P., George swiftly fled, and, for the
perfection of his uncle-in-law's amazement, disappeared into the Tiger.
Then the occupant of the perambulator began to
weep.
The figure of Samuel Peel, dressed as a Justice of
the Peace should be dressed for the Bench, in a frockcoat and a ceremonious
neck-tie, and (of course) spats over his spotless boots; the figure of Samuel
Peel, the wrinkled and dry bachelor (who never in his life had held a saucepan
of infant's food over a gas-jet in the middle of the night), this figure
staring horror-struck through spectacles at the loud contents of the
perambulator, soon excited attention in the market-place of Bursley. And Mr Peel
perceived the attention.
He guessed that the babe was Mary's babe, though
he was quite incapable of recognizing it. And he could not imagine what George
was doing with it (and the perambulator) in Bursley, nor why he had vanished so
swiftly into the Tiger, nor why he had not come out again. The whole situation
was in the acutest degree mysterious. It was also in the acutest degree
amazing. Samuel Peel had no facility in baby-talk, so, to tranquillize Georgie,
he attempted soothing strokes or pats on such portions of Georgie's skin as
were exposed. Whereupon Georgie shrieked, and even dogs stood still and lifted
noses inquiringly.
Then Jos Curtenty, very ancient but still a wag,
passed by, and said:
"Hello, Mr Peel. Truth will out. And yet
who'd ha' suspected you o' being secretly married!"
Samuel Peel could not take offence, because Jos
Curtenty, besides being old and an alderman, and an ex-Mayor, was an important
member of his election committee. Of course such a friendly joke from an
incurable joker like Jos Curtenty was all right; but supposing enemies began to
joke on similar lines--how he might be prejudiced at the polls! It was absurd,
totally absurd, to conceive Samuel Peel in any other relation than that of an
uncle to a baby; yet the more absurd a slander the more eagerly it was
believed, and a slander once started could never be overtaken.
What on earth was George Peel doing in Bursley
with that baby? Why had he not announced his arrival? Where was the baby's
mother? Where was their luggage? Why, in the name of reason, had George
vanished so swiftly into the Tiger, and what in the name of decency and
sobriety was he doing in the Tiger such a prodigious time?
It occurred to him that possibly George had
written to him and the letter had miscarried.
But in that case, where had they slept the
previous night? They could not have come down from
Little Georgie persevered in the production of
yells that might have been heard as far as the Wesleyan Chapel, and certainly as
far as the Conservative Club.
Then Mr Duncalf, the Town Clerk, went by, from his
private office, towards the Town Hall, and saw the singular spectacle of the
public man and the perambulator. Mr Duncalf, too, was a bachelor.
"So you've come down to see 'em," said
Mr Duncalf, gruffly, pretending that the baby was not there.
"See whom?
"Well, your niece and her husband, of
course."
"Where are they?" asked Mr Peel, without
having sufficiently considered the consequences of his question.
"Aren't they in the Tiger?" said Mr
Duncalf. "They put up there yesterday afternoon, anyhow. But naturally you
know that."
He departed, nodding. The baby's extraordinary
noise incommoded him and seemed somehow to make him blush if he stood near it.
Mr Peel did not gasp. It is at least two centuries
since men gasped from astonishment. Nevertheless, Mr Duncalf with those
careless words had simply knocked the breath out of him. Never, never would he
have guessed, even in the wildest surmise, that Mary and her husband and child
would sleep at the Tiger! The thought unmanned him. What! A baby at the Tiger!
Let it not be imagined for a moment that the Tiger
is not an utterly respectable hotel. It is, always was, always will be. Not the
faintest slur had ever been cast upon its licence. Still, it had a bar and a
barmaid, and indubitably people drank at the bar. When a prominent man took to
drink (as prominent men sometimes did), people would say, "He's always
nipping into the Tiger!" Or, "You'll see him at the Tiger before
eleven o'clock in the morning!" Hence to Samuel Peel, total abstainer and
temperance reformer, the Tiger, despite its vast respectability and the
reputation of its eighteen-penny ordinary, was a place of sin, a place of
contamination; briefly, a "gin palace," if not a "gaming
saloon." On principle, Samuel Peel (as his niece suspected) had never set
foot in the Tiger. The thought that his great-nephew and his niece had actually
slept there horrified him.
And further and worse; what would people say about
Samuel Peel's relatives having to stop at the Tiger, while Samuel Peel's large
house up at Hillport was practically empty? Would they not deduce family
quarrels, feuds, scandals? The situation was appalling.
He glanced about, but he did not look high enough
to see that George was watching him from a second-floor window of the Tiger,
and he could not hear Mary imploring George: "Do for goodness sake go back
to him." Ladies passed along the pavement, stifling their curiosity. At
the back of the Town Hall there began to collect the usual crowd of idlers who
interest themselves in the sittings of the police-court.
Then Georgie, bored with weeping, dropped off into
slumber. Samuel Peel saw that he could not, with dignity, lift the perambulator
up the steps into the porch of the Tiger, and so he began to wheel it
cautiously down the side-entrance into the Tiger yard. And in the yard he met
George, just emerging from the side-door on whose lamp is written the word
"Billiards."
"So sorry to have troubled you, uncle. But
the wife's unwell, and I'd forgotten something. Asleep, is he?"
George spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, with no
hint whatever that he bore ill-will against Samuel Peel for having robbed him
of two hundred a year. And Samuel felt as though he had robbed George of two
hundred a year.
"But--but," asked Samuel, "what are
you doing here?"
"We're stopping here," said George.
"I've come down to look out for some work--modelling, or anything I can
get hold of. I shall begin a round of the manufacturers this afternoon. We
shall stay here till I can find furnished rooms, or a cheap house. It's all up
with sculpture now, you know."
"Why! I thought you were doing excellently.
That medal--"
"Yes. In reputation. But it was just now that
I wanted money for a big job, and--and--well, I couldn't have it. So there you
are. Seven years wasted. But, of course, it was better to cut the loss. I never
pretend that things aren't what they are. Mind you, I'm not blaming you, uncle.
You're no doubt hard up like other people."
"But--but," Samuel began stammering
again. "Why didn't you come straight to me--instead of here?"
George put on a confidential look.
"The fact is," said he, "Mary
wouldn't. She's vexed. You know how women are. They never understand
things--especially money."
"Vexed with me?"
"Yes."
"But why?" Again Samuel felt like a
culprit.
"I fancy it must be something you said in
your letter concerning champagne."
"It was only what I read about you in a
paper."
"I suppose so. But she thinks you meant it to
insult her. She thinks you must have known perfectly well that we simply asked
the reporter to put champagne in because it looks well--seems very flourishing,
you know."
"I must see Mary," said Samuel. "Of
course the idea of you staying on here is perfectly ridiculous, perfectly
ridiculous. What do you suppose people will say?"
"I'd like you to see her," said George.
"I wish you would. You may be able to do what I can't. You'll find her in
Room 14. She's all dressed. But I warn you she's in a fine state."
"You'd better come too," said Samuel.
George lifted Georgie out of the perambulator.
"Here," said George. "Suppose you
carry him to her."
Samuel hesitated, and yielded. And the strange
procession started upstairs.
In two hours a cab was taking all the Peels to
Hillport.
In two days George and his family were returning
to
But it was long before Bursley ceased to talk of
George Peel and his family putting up at the Tiger. And it was still longer
before the barmaid ceased to describe to her favourite customers the incredible
spectacle of Samuel Peel, J.P., stumbling up the stairs of the Tiger with an
infant in his arms.
Three
episodes in the life of Mr. Cowlishaw, Dentist
1.
They all happened on the same day. And that day
was a Saturday, the red Saturday on which, in the unforgettable football match
between Tottenham Hot-spur and the Hanbridge F.C. (formed regardless of expense
in the matter of professionals to take the place of the bankrupt Knype F.C.),
the referee would certainly have been murdered had not a Five Towns crowd
observed its usual miraculous self-restraint.
Mr Cowlishaw -- aged twenty-four, a fair-haired
bachelor with a weak moustache--had bought the practice of the retired Mr
Rapper, a dentist of the very old school. He was not a native of the Five
Towns. He came from
His place of business--or whatever high-class
dentists choose to call it--in
Mr Cowlishaw went to bed. He was a good sleeper;
at least, he was what is deemed a good sleeper in
He had not been in bed five minutes before he
heard and felt an earthquake. This earthquake seemed to have been born towards
the north-east, in the direction of
He had not been in bed ten minutes before he heard
and felt another earthquake. This earthquake seemed to have been born towards
the north-east, in the direction of
"Well," he muttered, "this is a bit
thick, this is!"
(They use such language in cathedral towns.)
"However, let's hope it's the last."
It was not the last. Exactly, it was the last but
twenty-three. Regularly at intervals of five minutes the Five Towns Electric
Traction Company, Limited, sent one of their dreadful engines down the street,
apparently with the object of disintegrating all the real property in the neighbourhood
into its original bricks. At the seventeenth time Mr Cowlishaw trembled to hear
a renewal of the bump-bump-bump. It was the oval-wheeled car, which had been to
Longshaw and back. He recognized it as an old friend. He wondered whether he
must expect it to pass a third time. However, it did not pass a third time.
After several clocks in and out of the hotel had more or less agreed on the
fact that it was one o'clock, there was a surcease of earthquakes. Mr Cowlishaw
dared not hope that earthquakes were over. He waited in strained attention
during quite half an hour, expectant of the next earthquake. But it did not
come. Earthquakes were, indeed, done with till the morrow.
It was about two o'clock when his nerves were
sufficiently tranquillized to enable him to envisage the possibility of going
to sleep. And he was just slipping, gliding, floating off when he was brought
back to realities by a terrific explosion of laughter at the head of the stairs
outside his bedroom door. The building rang like the inside of a piano when you
strike a wire directly. The explosion was followed by low rumblings of laughter
and then by a series of jolly, hearty "Good-nights." He recognized
the voices as being those of a group of commercial travellers and two actors
(of the Hanbridge Theatre Royal's specially selected London Pantomime Company),
who had been pointed out to him with awe and joy by the aforesaid barmaid. They
were telling each other stories in the private bar, and apparently they had
been telling each other stories ever since. And the truth is that the
atmosphere of the Turk's Head, where commercial travellers and actors forgather
every night except perhaps Sundays, contains more good stories to the cubic
inch than any other resort in the county of Staffordshire. A few seconds after
the explosion there was a dropping fusillade-the commercial travellers and the
actors shutting their doors. And about five minutes later there was another and
more complicated dropping fusillade - the commercial travellers and actors opening
their doors, depositing their boots (two to each soul), and shutting their
doors.
Then silence.
And then out of the silence the terrified Mr
Cowlishaw heard arising and arising a vast and fearful breathing, as of some
immense prehistoric monster in pain. At first he thought he was asleep and
dreaming. But he was not. This gigantic sighing continued regularly, and Mr
Cowlishaw had never heard anything like it before. It banished sleep.
After about two hours of its awful uncanniness, Mr
Cowlishaw caught the sound of creeping footsteps in the corridor and fumbling
noises. He got up again. He was determined, though he should have to
interrogate burglars and assassins, to discover the meaning of that horrible
sighing. He courageously pulled his door open, and saw an aproned man with a
candle marking boots with chalk, and putting them into a box.
"I say!" said Mr Cowlishaw.
"Beg yer pardon, sir," the man
whispered. "I'm getting forward with my work so as I can go to th' futbaw match
this afternoon. I hope I didn't wake ye, sir."
"Look here! "said Mr Cowlishaw.
"What's that appalling noise that's going on all the time?"
"Noise, sir? " whispered the man,
astonished.
"Yes," Mr Cowlishaw insisted. "Like
something breathing. Can't you hear it?"
The man cocked his ears attentively. The noise
veritably boomed in Mr Cowlishaw's ears.
"Oh! That" said the man at
length. "That's th' blast furnaces at Cauldon Bar Ironworks. Never heard
that afore, sir? Why, it's like that every night. Now you mention it, I do
hear it! It's a good couple o' miles off, though, that is!"
Mr Cowlishaw closed his door.
At five o'clock, when he had nearly, but not
quite, forgotten the sighing, his lifelong friend, the oval-wheeled electric car,
bumped and quaked through the street, and the ewer and basin chattered together
busily, and the seismic phenomena definitely recommenced. The night was still
black, but the industrial day had dawned in the Five Towns. Long series of
carts without springs began to jolt past under the window of Mr Cowlishaw, and
then there was a regular multitudinous clacking of clogs and boots on the
pavement. A little later the air was rent by first one steam-whistle, and then
another, and then another, in divers tones announcing that it was six o'clock,
or five minutes past, or half-past, or anything. The periodicity of earth.
quakes had by this time quickened to five minutes, as at midnight. A motor-car
emerged under the archway of the hotel, and remained stationary outside with
its engine racing. And amid the earthquakes, the motorcar, the carts, the clogs
and boots, and the steam muezzins calling the faithful to work, Mr Cowlishaw
could still distinguish the tireless, monstrous sighing of the Cauldon Bar
blast furnaces. And, finally, he heard another sound. It came from the room
next to his, and, when he heard it, exhausted though he was, exasperated though
he was, he burst into laughter, so comically did it strike him.
It was an alarm-clock going off in the next room.
And, further, when he arrived downstairs, the
barmaid, sweet, conscientious little thing, came up to him and said, "I'm
so sorry, sir. I quite forgot to tell the boots to call you!"
2.
That afternoon he sat in his beautiful new surgery
and waited for dental sufferers to come to him from all quarters of the Five
Towns. It needs not to be said that nobody came. The mere fact that a new
dentist has "set up "in a district is enough to cure all the
toothache for miles around. The one martyr who might, perhaps, have paid him a
visit and a fee did not show herself. This martyr was Mrs Simeon Clowes, the
mayoress. By a curious chance, he had observed, during his short sojourn at the
Turk's Head, that the landlady thereof was obviously in pain from her teeth, or
from a particular tooth. She must certainly have informed herself as to his
name and condition, and Mr Cowlishaw thought that it would have been a graceful
act on her part to patronize him, as he had patronized the Turk's Head. But no!
Mayoresses, even the most tactful, do not always do the right thing at the
right moment.
Besides, she had doubtless gone, despite
toothache, to the football match with the Mayor, the new club being under the
immediate patronage of his Worship. All the potting world had gone to the
football match. Mr Cowlishaw would have liked to go, but it would have been
madness to quit the surgery on his opening day. So he sat and yawned, and
peeped at the crowd crowding to the match at two o'clock, and crowding back in
the gloom at four o'clock; and at a quarter past five he was reading a full
description of the carnage and the heroism in the football edition of the Signal.
Though Hanbridge had been defeated, it appeared from the Signal that
Hanbridge was the better team, and that Rannoch, the new Scotch centre-forward,
had fought nobly for the town which had bought him so dear.
Mr Cowlishaw was just dozing over the Signal
when there happened a ring at his door. He did not precipitate himself upon the
door. With beating heart he retained his presence of mind, and said to himself
that of course it could not possibly be a client. Even dentists who bought a
practice ready-made never had a client on their first day. He heard the
attendant answer the ring, and then he heard the attendant saying, "I'll
see, sir."
It was, in fact, a patient. The servant, having
asked Mr Cowlishaw if Mr Cowlishaw was at liberty, introduced the patient to
the Presence, and the Presence trembled.
The patient was a tall, stiff, fair man of about
thirty, with a tousled head and inelegant but durable clothing. He had a
drooping moustache, which prevented Mr Cowlishaw from adding his teeth up
instantly.
"Good afternoon, mister," said the
patient, abruptly.
"Good afternoon," said Mr Cowlishaw.
"Have you... Can I..."
Strange; in the dental hospital and school there
had been no course of study in the art of pattering to patients!
"It's like this," said the patient,
putting his hand in his waistcoat pocket.
"Will you kindly sit down," said Mr
Cowlishaw, turning up the gas, and pointing to the chair of chairs.
"It's like this," repeated the patient,
doggedly. "You see these three teeth? "
He displayed three very real teeth in a piece of
reddened paper. As a spectacle, they were decidedly not appetizing, but Mr
Cowlishaw was hardened.
"Really!" said Mr Cowlishaw,
impartially, gazing on them.
"They're my teeth," said the patient.
And thereupon he opened his mouth wide, and displayed, not without vanity, a
widowed gum. "'Ont 'eeth," he exclaimed, keeping his mouth open and
omitting preliminary consonants.
"Yes," said Mr Cowlishaw, with a dry
inflection. "I saw that they were upper incisors. How did this come about?
An accident, I suppose? "
"Well," said the man, "you may call
it an accident; I don't. My name's Rannoch; centre-forward. Ye see? Were ye at
the match?
Mr Cowlishaw understood. He had no need of further
explanation; he had read it all in the Signal. And so the chief victim
of Tottenham Hotspur had come to him, just him! This was luck! For Rannoch was,
of course, the most celebrated man in the Five Towns, and the idol of the
populace. He might have been M.P. had he chosen.
"Dear me!" Mr Cowlishaw sympathized, and
he said again, pointing more firmly to the chair of chairs, "Will you sit
down?
"I had 'em all picked up," Mr Rannoch
proceeded, ignoring the suggestion. "Because a bit of a scheme came into
my head. And that's why I've come to you, as you're just commencing dentist.
Supposing you put these teeth on a bit of green velvet in the case in
your window, with a big card to say as they're
guaranteed to be my genuine teeth, knocked out by that blighter of a Tottenham
half-back, you'll have such a crowd as was never seen around your door. All the
Five Towns '11 come to see 'em. It'll be the biggest advertisement that either
you or any other dentist ever had. And you might put a little notice in the Signal
saying that my teeth are on view at your premises; it would only cost ye a
shilling. . . . I should expect ye to furnish me with new teeth for nothing, ye
see."
In his travels throughout England Mr Rannoch had
lost most of his Scotch accent, but he had not lost his Scotch skill in the art
and craft of trying to pay less than other folks for whatever he might happen
to want.
Assuredly the idea was an idea of genius. As an
advertisement it would be indeed colossal and unique. Tens of thousands would
gaze spellbound for hours at those relics of their idol, and every gazer would
inevitably be familiarized with the name and address of Mr Cowlishaw, and with
the fact that Mr Cowlishaw was dentist-in-chief to the heroical Rannoch.
Unfortunately, in dentistry there is etiquette. And the etiquette of dentistry
is as terrible, as unbending, as the etiquette of the Court of Austria.
Mr Cowlishaw knew that he could not do this thing
without sinning against etiquette.
I'm sorry I can't fall in with your scheme,"
said he, "but I can't."
"But, man!" protested the
Scotchman, "it's the greatest scheme that ever was."
"Yes," said Mr Cowlishaw, "but it
would be unprofessional."
Mr Rannoch was himself a professional. "Oh,
well," he said sarcastically, "if you're one of those
amateurs--"
"I'll put you the job in as low as
possible," said Mr Cowlishaw, persuasively.
But Scotchmen are not to be persuaded like that.
Mr Rannoch wrapped up his teeth and left.
What finally happened to those teeth Mr Cowlishaw
never knew. But he satisfied himself that they were not advertised in the Signal.
3.
Now, just as Mr Cowlishaw was personally
conducting to the door the greatest goal-getter that the Five Towns had ever
seen there happened another ring, and thus it fell out that Mr Cowlishaw found
himself in the double difficulty of speeding his first visitor and welcoming
his second all in the same breath. It is true that the second might imagine
that the first was a client, but then the aspect of Mr Rannoch's mouth, had it
caught the eye of the second, was not reassuring. However, Mr Rannoch's mouth
happily did not catch the eye of the second.
The second was a visitor beyond Mr Cowlishaw's
hopes, no other than Mrs Simeon Clowes, landlady of the Turk's Head and
Mayoress of Hanbridge; a tall and well-built, handsome, downright woman, of
something more than fifty and something less than sixty; the mother of five
married daughters, the aunt of fourteen nephews and nieces, the grandam of
seven, or it might be eight, assorted babies; in short, a lady of vast
influence. After all, then, she had come to him! If only he could please her,
he regarded his succession to his predecessor as definitely established and his
fortune made. No person in Hanbridge with any yearnings for style would dream,
he trusted, of going to any other dentist than the dentist patronized by Mrs
Clowes.
She eyed him interrogatively and firmly. She probed
into his character, and he felt himself pierced.
"You are Mr Cowlishaw? "she
began.
"Good afternoon, Mrs Clowes," he
replied. "Yes, I am. Can I be of service to you?"
"That depends," she said.
He asked her to step in, and in she stepped.
"Have you had any experience in taking teeth
out?" she asked in the surgery. Her hand stroked her left cheek.
"Oh yes," he said eagerly. "But, of
course, we try to avoid extraction as much as possible."
"If you're going to talk like that," she
said coldly, and even bitterly, "I'd better go."
He wondered what she was driving at.
"Naturally," he said, summoning all his
latent powers of diplomacy, "there are cases in which extraction is
unfortunately necessary."
"How many teeth have you extracted?" she
inquired.
"I really couldn't say," he lied.
"Very many."
"Because," she said, "you don't
look as if you could say 'Bo! 'to a goose."
He observed a gleam in her eye.
"I think I can say 'Bo! ' to a goose,"
he said.
She laughed.
"Don't fancy, Mr Cowlishaw, that if I laugh
I'm not in the most horrible pain. I am. When I tell you I couldn't go with Mr
Clowes to the match--"
"Will you take this seat? "he said,
indicating the chair of chairs; "then I can examine."
She obeyed. "I do hate the horrid, velvety
feeling of these chairs," she said; "it's most creepy."
"I shall have to trouble you to take your
bonnet off."
So she removed her bonnet, and he took it as he
might have taken his firstborn, and laid it gently to rest on his cabinet. Then
he pushed the gas-bracket so that the light came through the large crystal
sphere, and made the Mayoress blink.
"Now," he said soothingly, "kindly
open your mouth--wide."
Like all women of strong and generous character,
Mrs Simeon Clowes had a large mouth. She obediently extended it to dimensions
which must be described as august, at the same time pointing with her gloved
and chubby finger to a particular part of it.
"Yes, yes," murmured Mr Cowlishaw,
assuming a tranquillity which he did not feel. This was the first time that he
had ever looked into the mouth of a Mayoress, and the prospect troubled him.
He put his little ivory-handled mirror into that
mouth and studied its secrets.
"I see," he said, withdrawing the
mirror. "Exposed nerve. Quite simple. Merely wants stopping. When I've
done with it the tooth will be as sound as ever it was. All your other teeth
are excellent."
Mrs Clowes arose violently out of the chair.
"Now just listen to me, please," she
said. "I don't want any stopping; I won't have any stopping; I want that
tooth out. I've already quarrelled with one dentist this afternoon because he
refused to take it out. I came to you because you're young, and I thought you'd
be more reasonable. Surely a body can decide whether she'll have a tooth out or
not! It's my tooth. What's a dentist for? In my young days dentists never did
anything else but take teeth out. All I wish to know is, will you take it out
or will you not?"
It's really a pity--"
"That's my affair, isn't it? "she
stopped him, and moved towards her bonnet.
"If you insist," he said quickly,
"I will extract."
Well," she said, "if you don't call this
insisting, what do you call insisting? Let me tell you I didn't have a wink of
sleep last night!"
"Neither did I, in your confounded hoteli
"he nearly retorted; but thought better of it.
The Mayoress resumed her seat, taking her gloves
off.
"It's decided then? "she questioned.
"Certainly," said he. "Is your
heart good?
"Is my heart good? "she repeated.
"Young man, what business is that of yours? It's my tooth I want you to deal
with, not my heart."
"I must give you gas," said Mr
Cowhishaw, faintly.
"Gas!" she exclaimed. "You'll give
me no gas, young man. No! My heart is not good. I should die under gas. I
couldn't bear the idea of gas. You must take it out without gas, and you
mustn't hurt me. I'm a perfect baby, and you mustn't on any account hurt
me."
The moment was crucial. Supposing that he
refused--a promising career might be nipped in the bud; would, undoubtedly, be
nipped in the bud. Whereas, if he accepted the task, the patronage of the
aristocracy of Hanbridge was within his grasp. But the tooth was colossal,
monumental. He estimated the length of its triple root at not less than
"Very well, madam," he said, for he was
a brave youngster.
But he was in a panic. He felt as though he were
about to lead the charge of the Light Brigade. He wanted a stiff drink. (But
dentists may not drink.) If he failed to wrench the monument out at the first
pull the result would be absolute disaster; in an instant he would have ruined
the practice which had cost him so dear. And could he hope not to fail with the
first pull? At best he would hurt her indescribably. However, having consented,
he was obliged to go through with the affair.
He took every possible precaution. He chose his
most vicious instrument. He applied to the vicinity of the tooth the very
latest substitute for cocaine; he prepared cotton wool and warm water in a
glass. And at length, when he could delay the fatal essay no longer, he said:
"Now, I think we are ready."
"You won't hurt me? "she asked
anxiously.
"Not a bit," he replied, with an
admirable simulation of gaiety.
"Because if you do--"
He laughed. But it was a hysterical laugh. All hi
nerves were on end. And he was very conscious c having had no sleep during the
previous night. He had a sick feeling. The room swam. He collected himself with
a terrific effort.
"When I count one," he said, "I
shall take hold when I count two you must hold very tight to the chaii and when
I count three, out it will come."
Then he encircled her head with his left
~.rm--brutally, as dentists always are brutal in the thrillin crisis.
"Wider! " he shouted.
And he took possession of that tooth with hi
fiendish contrivance of steel.
"One--two--"
He didn't know what he was doing.
There was no three. There was a slight shriek and
a thud on the floor. Mrs Simeon Clowes jumped up and briskly rang a bell. The
attendant rushed in. The attendant saw Mrs Clowes gurgling into a handkerchief
which she pressed to her mouth with one hand, while with the other, in which
she held her bonnet, she was fanning the face of Mr Cowlishaw. Mr Cowlishaw ha
fainted from nervous excitement under fatigue. But his unconscious hand held
the forceps; and the forceps victorious, held the monumental tooth.
"O-o-pen the window," spluttered Mrs
Clowes the attendant. "He's gone off; he'll come to in minute."
She was flattered. Mr Cowlishaw was for ever
endeared to Mrs Clowes by this singular proof of her impressiveness. And a
woman like that can make the fortune of half a dozen dentists.
From
one generation to another
1.
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.
2.
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' '
'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.'
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.'
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Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Ana Isabel De La Torre Gallur
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Universitat de Valčncia Press