000
TALES
OF THE FIVE TOWNS
By
ARNOLD BENNETT
First published January 1905
TO
MARCEL SCHWOB
MY LITERARY GODFATHER IN FRANCE
CONTENTS
003
HIS WORSHIP THE GOOSEDRIVER
I
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 004 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, 005 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, 006 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
007
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 008 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!'
009 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 give 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.
010 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 011 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 gooseherd. 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 012 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 Oldcastle Street. By this time rumour had passed in front
of him and run off down side-streets like water let into an
irrigation system. At every corner was a knot of people, at most
windows a face. And the Deputy-Mayor never spoke nor smiled. The
farce was enormous; the memory of it would survive revolutions and
religions.
Halfway down Oldcastle Street the first disaster happened.
Electric tramways had not then knitted the Five Towns in a network
of steel; but the last word of civilization and refinement was
about to be uttered, and a gang of men were making patterns with
wires on the skyscape of Oldcastle Street. One of the wires,
slipping from its temporary gripper, swirled with an extraordinary
sound into the roadway, and writhed there in spirals. Several of
Mr. Curtenty's geese were knocked down, and rose obviously annoyed;
but the Barnacle gander fell with a clinging circle of wire round
his 013 muscular, glossy neck, and did not rise again.
It was a violent, mysterious, agonizing, and sudden death for him,
and must have confirmed his theories about the arbitrariness of
things. The thirteen passed pitilessly on. Mr. Curtenty freed the
gander from the coiling wire, and picked it up, but, finding it far
too heavy to carry, he handed it to a Corporation road-sweeper.
'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 Oldcastle Street, a
little in front of him, from the direction of St. Peter's Church,
and vanished towards Hillport. He knew the carriage; he had bought
it and paid for it. Deep, far down, in his mind stirred the
thought:
'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
014 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 garden of The Firs was filled
with lamentable complainings of a remnant of geese. His man Pond
met him with a stable-lantern.
'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.
015 '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 Oldcastle Street.
He'll wait for thee. Give him sixpence.'
'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.'
016 'Hast forgotten to count thysen?' Mr. Curtenty
answered blithely from the shelter of the side-door.
But within himself he was a little crest-fallen 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.
II
The dining-room of The Firs was a spacious and inviting
refectory, which owed nothing of its charm to William Morris,
Regent Street, 017 or the Arts and Crafts Society. Its triple
aim, was richness, solidity, and comfort, but especially comfort;
and this aim was achieved in new oak furniture of immovable
firmness, in a Turkey carpet which swallowed up the feet like a
feather bed, and in large oil-paintings, whose darkly-glinting
frames were a guarantee of their excellence. On a winter's night,
as now, the room was at its richest, solidest, most comfortable.
The blue plush curtains were drawn on their stout brass rods across
door and French window. Finest selected silkstone fizzed and flamed
in a patent grate which had the extraordinary gift of radiating
heat into the apartment instead of up the chimney. The shaded
Welsbach lights of the chandelier cast a dazzling luminance on the
tea-table of snow and silver, while leaving the pictures in a gloom
so discreet that not Ruskin himself could have decided whether
these were by Whistler or Peter Paul Rubens. On either side of the
marble mantelpiece were two easy-chairs of an immense, incredible
capacity, chairs of crimson plush for Titans, chairs softer than
moss, more pliant than a loving heart, more enveloping than a
caress. In one of 018 these chairs, that to the left of the
fireplace, Mr. Curtenty was accustomed to snore every Saturday and
Sunday afternoon, and almost every evening. The other was usually
empty, but to-night it was occupied by Mrs. Curtenty, the jewel of
the casket. In the presence of her husband she always used a small
rocking-chair of ebonized cane.
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 dæmonic women capable of doing without sleep for ten
nights in order to nurse you; capable of dying and 019 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 parlourmaid 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 020 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 021 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.
022 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 to-night?' 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, 023 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 London club; he ran down to Llandudno for week-ends;
and it was reported that he had been behind the scenes at the
Alhambra. Clara felt for the word 'Harry' the unreasoning affection
which most women lavish on 'George.'
'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.
024 '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 to-morrow'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 025 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 of 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 026 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 to-day?'
'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 Deputy-Mayor, so soon to be
Mayor, walked out of the room.
027 '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.
III
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, 028 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 029
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,
goosedriving 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 030 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 London for a week, and Josiah, under plea of his
son's absence, spent eight hours a day at the works. The brougham
remained in the coach-house.
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
031 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, 032 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.'
IV
Gas Gordon was to be on the platform at the poor people's treat.
As he walked down Trafalgar Road his eye caught a still-exposed
fragment of a decayed bill on a hoarding. It referred to a meeting
of the local branch of the Anti-Gambling League a year ago in the
lecture-hall of the Wesleyan Chapel, and it said that Councillor
Gordon would occupy the 033 chair on that
occasion. Mechanically Councillor Gordon stopped and tore the
fragment away from the hoarding.
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.
034 '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." 035 "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 'em to Hillport. ('Good old Jos!')
That's not all. The Mayor insisted on putting his own ten pounds to
mine and making it twenty. Here are the two identical notes, his
and mine.' Mr. Gordon waved the identical notes amid an uproar.
'We've decided that everyone who has dined here to-night shall
receive a brand-new shilling. I see Mr. Septimus Lovatt from the
bank there with a bag. He will attend to you as you go out.
(Wild outbreak and tumult of rapturous applause.) And now
three cheers for your Mayor—and Mayoress!'
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 036 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.
It was Monday afternoon of Bursley Wakes—not our modern
rectified festival, but the wild and naïve orgy of seventy
years ago, the days of bear-baiting and of bull-baiting, from which
latter phrase, they say, the town derives its name. In those times
there was a town-bull, a sort of civic beast; and a certain
notorious character kept a bear in his pantry. The 'beating'
(baiting) occurred usually on Sunday mornings at six o'clock, with
formidable hungry dogs; and little boys used to look forward
eagerly to the day when they would be old enough to be permitted to
attend. On Sunday afternoons colliers and potters, gathered round
the jawbone of a whale which then stood as a natural curiosity on
the waste space near the corn-mill, would discuss the fray, and
make bets for next Sunday, while the exhausted dogs 040 licked
their wounds, or died. During the Wakes week bull and bear were
baited at frequent intervals, according to popular demand, for
thousands of sportsmen from neighbouring villages seized the
opportunity of the fair to witness the fine beatings for which
Bursley was famous throughout the country of the Five Towns. In
that week the Wakes took possession of the town, which yielded
itself with savage abandonment to all the frenzies of license. The
public-houses remained continuously open night and day, and the
barmen and barmaids never went to bed; every inn engaged special
'talent' in order to attract custom, and for a hundred hours the
whole thronged town drank, drank, until the supply of coin of
George IV., converging gradually into the coffers of a few persons,
ceased to circulate. Towards the end of the Wakes, by way of a last
ecstasy, the cockfighters would carry their birds, which had
already fought and been called off, perhaps, half a dozen times, to
the town-field (where the discreet 40 per cent. brewery now
stands), and there match them to a finish. It was a spacious
age.
On this Monday afternoon in June the less 041 fervid activities of
the Wakes were proceeding as usual in the market-place,
overshadowed by the Town Hall—not the present stone structure
with its gold angel, but a brick edifice built on an ashlar
basement. Hobby-horses and revolving swing-boats, propelled, with
admirable economy to the proprietors, by privileged boys who took
their pay in an occasional ride, competed successfully with the
skeleton man, the fat or bearded woman, and Aunt Sally. The long
toy-tents, artfully roofed with a tinted cloth which permitted only
a soft, mellow light to illuminate the wares displayed, were
crowded with jostling youth and full of the sound of whistles,
'squarkers,' and various pipes; and multitudes surrounded the
gingerbread, nut, and savoury stalls which lined both sides of the
roadway as far as Duck Bank. In front of the numerous boxing-booths
experts of the 'fancy,' obviously out of condition, offered to
fight all comers, and were not seldom well thrashed by impetuous
champions of local fame. There were no photographic studios and no
cocoanut-shies, for these things had not been thought of; and to us
moderns the fair, despite its uncontrolled exuberance of revelry,
042
would have seemed strangely quiet, since neither steam-organ nor
hooter nor hurdy-gurdy was there to overwhelm the ear with crashing
waves of gigantic sound. But if the special phenomena of a later
day were missing from the carnival, others, as astonishing to us as
the steam-organ would have been to those uncouth roisterers, were
certainly present. Chief, perhaps, among these was the man who
retailed the elixir of youth, the veritable eau de jouvence,
to credulous drinkers at sixpence a bottle. This magician, whose
dark mysterious face and glittering eyes indicated a strain of
Romany blood, and whose accent proved that he had at any rate lived
much in Yorkshire, had a small booth opposite the watch-house under
the Town Hall. On a banner suspended in front of it was painted the
legend:
THE INCA OF PERU'S
ELIXER OF YOUTH SOLD HERE.
ETERNAL YOUTH FOR ALL. DRINK THIS AND YOU
WILL NEVER GROW OLD AS SUPPLIED TO THE NOBILITY
& GENTRY SIXPENCE PER BOT.
WALK IN, WALK IN, & CONSULT THE INCA
OF PERU.
043 The Inca of Peru, dressed in black velveteens,
with a brilliant scarf round his neck, stood at the door of his
tent, holding an empty glass in one jewelled hand, and with the
other twirling a long and silken moustache. Handsome, graceful, and
thoroughly inured to the public gaze, he fronted a small circle of
gapers like an actor adroit to make the best of himself, and his
tongue wagged fast enough to wag a man's leg off. At a casual
glance he might have been taken for thirty, but his age was fifty
and more—if you could catch him in the morning before he had
put the paint on.
'Ladies and gentlemen of Bursley, this enlightened and beautiful
town which I am now visiting for the first time,' he began in a
hard, metallic voice, employing again with the glib accuracy of a
machine the exact phrases which he had been using all day, 'look at
me—look well at me. How old do you think I am? How old do I
seem? Twenty, my dear, do you say?' and he turned with practised
insolence to a pot-girl in a red shawl who could not have uttered
an audible word to save her soul, but who blushed and giggled with
pleasure at this mark of attention. 'Ah! you flatter, 044 fair
maiden! I look more than twenty, but I think I may say that I do
not look thirty. Does any lady or gentleman think I look thirty?
No! As a matter of fact, I was twenty-nine years of age when, in
South America, while exploring the ruins of the most ancient
civilization of the world—of the world, ladies and
gentlemen—I made my wonderful discovery, the Elixir of
Youth!'
'What art blethering at, Licksy?' a drunken man called from the
back of the crowd, and the nickname stuck to the great discoverer
during the rest of the Wakes.
'That, ladies and gentlemen,' the Inca of Peru continued
unperturbed, 'was—seventy-two years ago. I am now a hundred
and one years old precisely, and as fresh as a kitten, all along of
my marvellous elixir. Far older, for instance, than this good dame
here.'
He pointed to an aged and wrinkled woman, in blue cotton and a
white mutch, who was placidly smoking a short cutty. This creature,
bowed and satiate with monotonous years, took the pipe from her
indrawn lips, and asked in a weary, trembling falsetto:
'How many wives hast had?'
045 'Seventane,' the Inca retorted quickly,
dropping at once into broad dialect, 'and now lone and lookin' to
wed again. Wilt have me?'
'Nay,' replied the crone. 'I've buried four mysen, and no man o'
mine shall bury me.'
There was a burst of laughter, amid which the Inca, taking the
crowd archly into his confidence, remarked:
'I've never administered my elixir to any of my wives, ladies
and gentlemen. You may blame me, but I freely confess the fact;'
and he winked.
'Licksy! Licksy!' the drunken man idiotically chanted.
'And now,' the Inca proceeded, coming at length to the practical
part of his ovation, 'see here!' With the rapidity of a conjurer he
whipped from his pocket a small bottle, and held it up before the
increasing audience. It contained a reddish fluid, which shone
bright and rich in the sunlight. 'See here!' he cried
magnificently, but he was destined to interruption.
A sudden cry arose of 'Black Jack! Black Jack! 'Tis him! He's
caught!' And the 046 Inca's crowd, together with all the other
crowds filling the market-place, surged off eastward in a dense,
struggling mass.
The cynosure of every eye was a springless clay-cart, which was
being slowly driven past the newly-erected 'big house' of Enoch
Wood, Esquire, towards the Town Hall. In this, cart were two
constables, with their painted staves drawn, and between the
constables sat a man securely chained—Black Jack of
Moorthorne, the mining village which lies over the ridge a mile or
so east of Bursley. The captive was a ferocious and splendid young
Hercules, tall, with enormous limbs and hands and heavy black
brows. He was dressed in his soiled working attire of a collier,
the trousers strapped under the knees, and his feet shod in vast
clogs. With open throat, small head, great jaws, and bold beady
eyes, he looked what he was, the superb brute—the brute
reckless of all save the instant satisfaction of his desires. He
came of a family of colliers, the most debased class in a lawless
district. Jack's father had been a colliery-serf, legally enslaved
to his colliery, legally liable to be sold with the colliery as a
chattel, 047 and legally bound to bring up all his sons as
colliers, until the Act of George III. put an end to this
incredible survival from the customs of the Dark Ages. Black Jack
was now a hero to the crowd, and knew it, for those vast clogs had
kicked a woman to death on the previous day. She was a Moorthorne
woman, not his wife, but his sweetheart, older than he; people said
that she nagged him, and that he was tired of her. The murderer had
hidden for a night, and then, defiantly, surrendered to the watch,
and the watch were taking him to the watch-house in the ashlar
basement of the Town Hall. The feeble horse between the shafts of
the cart moved with difficulty through the press, and often the
coloured staves of the constables came down thwack on the heads of
heedless youth. At length the cart reached the space between the
watch-house and the tent of the Inca of Peru, where it stopped
while the constables unlocked a massive door; the prisoner remained
proudly in the cart, accepting, with obvious delight, the tribute
of cheers and jeers, hoots and shouts, from five thousand
mouths.
The Inca of Peru stood at the door of his 048 tent and surveyed
Black Jack, who was not more than a few feet away from him.
'Have a glass of my elixir,' he said to the death-dealer; 'no
one in this town needs it more than thee, by all accounts. Have a
glass, and live for ever. Only sixpence.'
The man in the cart laughed aloud.
'I've nowt on me—not a farden,' he answered, in a strong
grating voice.
At that moment a girl, half hidden by the cart, sprang forward,
offering something in her outstretched palm to the Inca; but he,
misunderstanding her intention, merely glanced with passing
interest at her face, and returned his gaze to the prisoner.
'I'll give thee a glass, lad,' he said quickly, 'and then thou
canst defy Jack Ketch.'
The crowd yelled with excitement, and the murderer held forth
his great hand for the potion. Using every art to enhance the
effect of this dramatic advertisement, the Inca of Peru raised his
bottle on high, and said in a loud, impressive tone:
'This precious liquid has the property, possessed by no other
liquid on earth, of frothing twice. I shall pour it into the glass,
049
and it will froth. Black Jack will drink it, and after he has drunk
it will froth again. Observe!'
He uncorked the bottle and filled the glass with the reddish
fluid, which after a few seconds duly effervesced, to the vague
wonder of the populace. The Inca held the glass till the froth had
subsided, and then solemnly gave it to Black Jack.
'Drink!' commanded the Inca.
Black Jack took the draught at a gulp, and instantly flung the
glass at the Inca's face. It missed him, however. There were signs
of a fracas, but the door of the watch-house swung opportunely
open, and Jack was dragged from the cart and hustled within. The
crowd, with a crowd's fickleness, turned to other affairs.
That evening the ingenious Inca of Peru did good trade for
several hours, but towards eleven o'clock the attraction of the
public-houses and of a grand special combined bull and bear beating
by moonlight in the large yard of the Cock Inn drew away the circle
of his customers until there was none left. He retired inside the
tent with several pounds in his pocket and a god's consciousness of
having 050 made immortal many of the sons and daughters
of Adam.
As he was counting out his gains on the tub of eternal youth by
the flicker of a dip, someone lifted the flap of the booth and
stealthily entered. He sprang up, fearing robbery with violence,
which was sufficiently common during the Wakes; but it was only the
young girl who had stood behind the cart when he offered to Black
Jack his priceless boon. The Inca had noticed her with increasing
interest several times during the evening as she loitered restless
near the door of the watch-house.
'What do you want?' he asked her, with the ingratiating
affability of the rake who foresees everything.
'Give me a drink.'
'A drink of what, my dear?'
'Licksy.'
He raised the dip, and by its light examined her face. It was a
kind of face which carries no provocative signal for nine men out
of ten, but which will haunt the tenth: a child's face with a
passionate woman's eyes burning and dying in it—black hair,
black eyes, thin pale 051 cheeks, equine
nostrils, red lips, small ears, and the smallest chin conceivable.
He smiled at her, pleased.
'Can you pay for it?' he said pleasantly.
The girl evidently belonged to the poorest class. Her shaggy,
uncovered head, lean frame, torn gown, and bare feet, all spoke of
hardship and neglect.
'I've a silver groat,' she answered, and closed her small fist
tighter.
'A silver groat!' he exclaimed, rather astonished. 'Where did
you get that from?'
'He give it me for a-fairing yesterday.'
'Who?'
'Him yonder'—she jerked her head back to indicate the
watch-house—'Black Jack.'
'What for?'
'He kissed me,' she said boldly; 'I'm his sweetheart.'
'Eh!' The Inca paused a moment, startled. 'But he killed his
sweetheart yesterday.'
'What! Meg!' the girl exclaimed with deep scorn. 'Her weren't
his true sweetheart. Her druv him to it. Serve her well right! Owd
Meg!'
'How old are you, my dear?'
052 'Don't know. But feyther said last Wakes I was
fourtane. I mun keep young for Jack. He wunna have me if I'm
owd.'
'But he'll be hanged, they say.'
She gave a short, satisfied laugh.
'Not now he's drunk Licksy—hangman won't get him. I heard
a man say Jack 'd get off wi' twenty year for manslaughter, most
like.'
'And you'll wait twenty years for him?'
'Yes,' she said; 'I'll meet him at prison gates. But I mun be
young. Give me a drink o' Licksy.'
He drew the red draught in silence, and after it had effervesced
offered it to her.
''Tis raight?' she questioned, taking the glass.
The Inca nodded, and, lifting the vessel, she opened her eager
lips and became immortal. It was the first time in her life that
she had drunk out of a glass, and it would be the last.
Struck dumb by the trusting joy in those profound eyes, the Inca
took the empty glass from her trembling hand. Frail organism and
prey of love! Passion had surprised her too young. Noon had come
before the flower could open. She went out of the tent.
053 'Wench!' the Inca called after her, 'thy
groat!'
She paid him and stood aimless for a second, and then started to
cross the roadway. Simultaneously there was a rush and a roar from
the Cock yard close by. The raging bull, dragging its ropes, and
followed by a crowd of alarmed pursuers, dashed out. The girl was
plain in the moonlight. Many others were abroad, but the bull
seemed to see nothing but her, and, lowering his huge head, he
charged with shut eyes and flung her over the Inca's booth.
'Thou's gotten thy wish: thou'rt young for ever!' the Inca of
Peru, made a poet for an instant by this disaster, murmured to
himself as he bent with the curious crowd over the corpse.
Black Jack was hanged.
Many years after all this Bursley built itself a new Town Hall
(with a spire, and a gold angel on the top in the act of crowning
the bailiwick with a gold crown), and began to think about getting
up in the world.
057
MARY WITH THE HIGH HAND
In the front-bedroom of Edward Beechinor's small house in
Trafalgar Road the two primary social forces of action and
reaction—those forces which under a thousand names and
disguises have alternately ruled the world since the invention of
politics—were pitted against each other in a struggle
rendered futile by the equality of the combatants. Edward Beechinor
had his money, his superior age, and the possible advantage of
being a dying man; Mark Beechinor had his youth and his devotion to
an ideal. Near the window, aloof and apart, stood the strange,
silent girl whose aroused individuality was to intervene with such
effectiveness on behalf of one of the antagonists. It was early
dusk on an autumn day.
'Tell me what it is you want, Edward,' said Mark quietly. 'Let
us come to the point.'
058 'Ay,' said the sufferer, lifting his pale hand
from the counterpane, 'I'll tell thee.'
He moistened his lips as if in preparation, and pushed back a
tuft of sparse gray hair, damp with sweat.
The physical and moral contrast between these two brothers was
complete. Edward was forty-nine, a small, thin, stunted man, with a
look of narrow cunning, of petty shrewdness working without
imagination. He had been clerk to Lawyer Ford for thirty-five
years, and had also furtively practised for himself. During this
period his mode of life had never varied, save once, and that only
a year ago. At the age of fourteen he sat in a grimy room with an
old man on one side of him, a copying-press on the other, and a
law-stationer's almanac in front, and he earned half a crown a
week. At the age of forty-eight he still sat in the same grimy room
(of which the ceiling had meanwhile been whitened three times),
with the same copying-press and the almanac of the same
law-stationers, and he earned thirty shillings a week. But now he,
Edward Beechinor, was the old man, and the indispensable lad of
fourteen, who had once been 059 himself, was another
lad, perhaps thirtieth of the dynasty of office-boys. Throughout
this interminable and sterile desert of time he had drawn the same
deeds, issued the same writs, written the same letters, kept the
same accounts, lied the same lies, and thought the same thoughts.
He had learnt nothing except craft, and forgotten nothing except
happiness. He had never married, never loved, never been a rake,
nor deviated from respectability. He was a success because he had
conceived an object, and by sheer persistence attained it. In the
eyes of Bursley people he was a very decent fellow, a steady
fellow, a confirmed bachelor, a close un, a knowing customer, a
curmudgeon, an excellent clerk, a narrow-minded ass, a good
Wesleyan, a thrifty individual, and an intelligent
burgess—according to the point of view. The lifelong
operation of rigorous habit had sunk him into a groove as deep as
the canon of some American river. His ideas on every subject were
eternally and immutably fixed, and, without being altogether aware
of it, he was part of the solid foundation of England's greatness.
In 1892, when the whole of the Five Towns was agitated by the great
probate case of 060 Wilbraham v. Wilbraham, in which Mr.
Ford acted for the defendants, Beechinor, then aged forty-eight,
was torn from his stool and sent out to Rio de Janeiro as part of a
commission to take the evidence of an important witness who had
declined all offers to come home.
The old clerk was full of pride and self-importance at being
thus selected, but secretly he shrank from the journey, the mere
idea of which filled him with vague apprehension and alarm. His
nature had lost all its adaptability; he trembled like a young girl
at the prospect of new experiences. On the return voyage the vessel
was quarantined at Liverpool for a fortnight, and Beechinor had an
attack of low fever. Eight months afterwards he was ill again.
Beechinor went to bed for the last time, cursing Providence,
Wilbraham v. Wilbraham, and Rio.
Mark Beechinor was thirty, just nineteen years younger than his
brother. Tall, uncouth, big-boned, he had a rather ferocious and
forbidding aspect; yet all women seemed to like him, despite the
fact that he seldom could open his mouth to them. There must have
been 061 something in his wild and liquid dark eyes
which mutely appealed for their protective sympathy, something
about him of shy and wistful romance that atoned for the huge
awkwardness of this taciturn elephant. Mark was at present the
manager of a small china manufactory at Longshaw, the farthest of
the Five Towns in Staffordshire, and five miles from Bursley. He
was an exceptionally clever potter, but he never made money. He had
the dreamy temperament of the inventor. He was a man of ideas, the
kind of man who is capable of forgetting that he has not had his
dinner, and who can live apparently content amid the grossest
domestic neglect. He had once spoilt a hundred and fifty pounds'
worth of ware by firing it in a new kiln of his own contrivance; it
cost him three years of atrocious parsimony to pay for the ware and
the building of the kiln. He was impulsively and recklessly
charitable, and his Saturday afternoons and Sundays were chiefly
devoted to the passionate propagandism of the theories of liberty,
equality, and fraternity.
'Is it true as thou'rt for marrying Sammy Mellor's daughter over
at Hanbridge?' Edward 062 Beechinor asked, in
the feeble, tremulous voice of one agonized by continual pain.
Among relatives and acquaintances he commonly spoke the Five
Towns dialect, reserving the other English for official use.
Mark stood at the foot of the bed, leaning with his elbows on
the brass rail. Like most men, he always felt extremely nervous and
foolish in a sick-room, and the delicacy of this question, so
bluntly put, added to his embarrassment. He looked round timidly in
the direction of the girl at the window; her back was towards
him.
'It's possible,' he replied. 'I haven't asked her yet.'
'Her'll have no money?'
'No.'
'Thou'lt want some brass to set up with. Look thee here, Mark: I
made my will seven years ago i' thy favour.'
'Thank ye,' said Mark gratefully.
'But that,' the dying man continued with a frown—'that was
afore thou'dst taken up with these socialistic doctrines o' thine.
I've heard as thou'rt going to be th' secretary o' the Hanbridge
Labour Church, as they call it.'
063 Hanbridge is the metropolis of the Five Towns,
and its Labour Church is the most audacious and influential of all
the local activities, half secret, but relentlessly determined,
whose aim is to establish the new democratic heaven and the new
democratic earth by means of a gradual and bloodless revolution.
Edward Beechinor uttered its abhorred name with a bitter and
scornful hatred characteristic of the Toryism of a man who, having
climbed high up out of the crowd, fiercely resents any widening or
smoothing of the difficult path which he himself has conquered.
'They've asked me to take the post,' Mark answered.
'What's the wages?' the older man asked, with exasperated
sarcasm.
'Nothing.'
'Mark, lad,' the other said, softening, 'I'm worth seven hundred
pounds and this freehold house. What dost think o' that?'
Even in that moment, with the world and its riches slipping away
from his dying grasp, the contemplation of this great achievement
of thrift filled Edward Beechinor with a sublime
064 satisfaction.
That sum of seven hundred pounds, which many men would dissipate in
a single night, and forget the next morning that they had done so,
seemed vast and almost incredible to him.
'I know you've always been very careful,' said Mark
politely.
'Give up this old Labour Church'—again old Beechinor laid
a withering emphasis on the phrase—'give up this Labour
Church, and its all thine—house and all.'
Mark shook his head.
'Think twice,' the sick man ordered angrily. 'I tell thee
thou'rt standing to lose every shilling.'
'I must manage without it, then.'
A silence fell.
Each brother was absolutely immovable in his decision, and the
other knew it. Edward might have said: 'I am a dying man: give up
this thing to oblige me.' And Mark could have pleaded: 'At such a
moment I would do anything to oblige you—except this, and
this I really can't do. Forgive me.' Such amenities would possibly
have eased the cord which was about to snap; but the idea of
regarding 065 Edward's condition as a factor in the case did
not suggest itself favourably to the grim Beechinor stock, so
stern, harsh, and rude. The sick man wiped from his sunken features
the sweat which continually gathered there. Then he turned upon his
side with a grunt.
'Thou must fetch th' lawyer,' he said at length, 'for I'll cut
thee off.'
It was a strange request—like ordering a condemned man to
go out and search for his executioner; but Mark answered with
perfect naturalness:
'Yes. Mr. Ford, I suppose?'
'Ford? No! Dost think I want him meddling i' my affairs?
Go to young Baines up th' road. Tell him to come at once. He's sure
to be at home, as it's Saturday night.'
'Very well.'
Mark turned to leave the room.
'And, young un, I've done with thee. Never pass my door again
till thou know'st I'm i' my coffin. Understand?'
Mark hesitated a moment, and then went out, quietly closing the
door. No sooner had he done so than the girl, hitherto so passive
at the window, flew after him.
066 There are some women whose calm, enigmatic
faces seem always to suggest the infinite. It is given to few to
know them, so rare as they are, and their lives usually so
withdrawn; but sometimes they pass in the street, or sit like
sphinxes in the church or the theatre, and then the memory of their
features, persistently recurring, troubles us for days. They are
peculiar to no class, these women: you may find them in a print
gown or in diamonds. Often they have thin, rather long lips and
deep rounded chins; but it is the fine upward curve of the nostrils
and the fall of the eyelids which most surely mark them. Their
glances and their faint smiles are beneficent, yet with a subtle
shade of half-malicious superiority. When they look at you from
under those apparently fatigued eyelids, you feel that they have an
inward and concealed existence far beyond the ordinary—that
they are aware of many things which you can never know. It is as
though their souls, during former incarnations, had trafficked with
the secret forces of nature, and so acquired a mysterious and
nameless quality above all the transient attributes of beauty, wit,
and talent. They exist: that is 067 enough; that is
their genius. Whether they control, or are at the mercy of, those
secret forces; whether they have in fact learnt, but may not speak,
the true answer to the eternal Why; whether they are not perhaps a
riddle even to their own simple selves: these are points which can
never be decided.
Everyone who knew Mary Beechinor, in her cousin's home, or at
chapel, or on Titus Price's earthenware manufactory, where she
worked, said or thought that 'there was something about her ...'
and left the phrase unachieved. She was twenty-five, and she had
lived under the same roof with Edward Beechinor for seven years,
since the sudden death of her parents. The arrangement then made
was that Edward should keep her, while she conducted his household.
She had insisted on permission to follow her own occupation, and in
order that she might be at liberty to do so she personally paid
eighteenpence a week to a little girl who came in to perform sundry
necessary duties every day at noon. Mary Beechinor was a paintress
by trade. As a class the paintresses of the Five Towns are somewhat
similar to the more famous mill-girls of Lancashire and
Yorkshire—fiercely 068 independent by
reason of good wages earned, loving finery and brilliant colours,
loud-tongued and aggressive, perhaps, and for the rest neither more
nor less kindly, passionate, faithful, than any other Saxon women
anywhere. The paintresses, however, have some slight advantage over
the mill-girls in the outward reticences of demeanour, due no doubt
to the fact that their ancient craft demands a higher skill, and is
pursued under more humane and tranquil conditions. Mary Beechinor
worked in the 'band-and-line' department of the painting-shop at
Price's. You may have observed the geometrical exactitude of the
broad and thin coloured lines round the edges of a common cup and
saucer, and speculated upon the means by which it was arrived at. A
girl drew those lines, a girl with a hand as sure as Giotto's, and
no better tools than a couple of brushes and a small revolving
table called a whirler. Forty-eight hours a week Mary Beechinor sat
before her whirler. Actuating the treadle, she placed a piece of
ware on the flying disc, and with a single unerring flip of the
finger pushed it precisely to the centre; then she held the full
brush firmly against the ware, and in three 069 seconds the band
encircled it truly; another brush taken up, and the line below the
band also stood complete. And this process was repeated, with
miraculous swiftness, hour after hour, week after week, year after
year. Mary could decorate over thirty dozen cups and saucers in a
day, at three halfpence the dozen. 'Doesn't she ever do anything
else?' some visitor might curiously inquire, whom Titus Price was
showing over his ramshackle manufactory. 'No, always the same
thing,' Titus would answer, made proud for the moment of this
phenomenon of stupendous monotony. 'I wonder how she can stand
it—she has a refined face,' the visitor might remark; and
Mary Beechinor was left alone again. The idea that her work was
monotonous probably never occurred to the girl. It was her
work—as natural as sleep, or the knitting which she always
did in the dinner-hour. The calm and silent regularity of it had
become part of her, deepening her original quiescence, and setting
its seal upon her inmost spirit. She was not in the fellowship of
the other girls in the painting-shop. She seldom joined their more
boisterous diversions, nor talked their talk, and she never
070
manoeuvred for their men. But they liked her, and their attitude
showed a certain respect, forced from them by they knew not what.
The powers in the office spoke of Mary Beechinor as 'a very
superior girl.'
She ran downstairs after Mark, and he waited in the narrow hall,
where there was scarcely room for two people to pass. Mark looked
at her inquiringly. Rather thin, and by no means tall, she seemed
the merest morsel by his side. She was wearing her second-best
crimson merino frock, partly to receive the doctor and partly
because it was Saturday night; over this a plain bibless apron. Her
cold gray eyes faintly sparkled in anger above the cheeks white
with watching, and the dropped corners of her mouth showed a
contemptuous indignation. Mary Beechinor was ominously roused from
the accustomed calm of years. Yet Mark at first had no suspicion
that she was disturbed. To him that pale and inviolate face, even
while it cast a spell over him, gave no sign of the fires
within.
She took him by the coat-sleeve and silently directed him into
the gloomy little parlour crowded with mahogany and horsehair
furniture, 071 white antimacassars, wax flowers under glass,
and ponderous gilt-clasped Bibles.
'It's a cruel shame!' she whispered, as though afraid of being
overheard by the dying man upstairs.
'Do you think I ought to have given way?' he questioned,
reddening.
'You mistake me,' she said quickly; and with a sudden movement
she went up to him and put her hand on his shoulder. The caress, so
innocent, unpremeditated, and instinctive, ran through him like a
voltaic shock. These two were almost strangers; they had scarcely
met till within the past week, Mark being seldom in Bursley. 'You
mistake me—it is a shame of him! I'm fearfully
angry.'
'Angry?' he repeated, astonished.
'Yes, angry.' She walked to the window, and, twitching at the
blind-cord, gazed into the dim street. It was beginning to grow
dark. 'Shall you fetch the lawyer? I shouldn't if I were you. I
won't.'
'I must fetch him,' Mark said.
She turned round and admired him. 'What will he do with
his precious money?' she murmured.
072 'Leave it to you, probably.'
'Not he. I wouldn't touch it—not now; it's yours by
rights. Perhaps you don't know that when I came here it was
distinctly understood I wasn't to expect anything under his will.
Besides, I have my own money ... Oh dear! If he wasn't in such
pain, wouldn't I talk to him—for the first and last time in
my life!'
'You must please not say a word to him. I don't really want the
money.'
'But you ought to have it. If he takes it away from you he's
unjust.'
'What did the doctor say this afternoon?' asked Mark, wishing to
change the subject.
'He said the crisis would come on Monday, and when it did Edward
would be dead all in a minute. He said it would be just like taking
prussic acid.'
'Not earlier than Monday?'
'He said he thought Monday.'
'Of course I shall take no notice of what Edward said to
me—I shall call to-morrow morning—and stay. Perhaps he
won't mind seeing me. And then you can tell me what happens
to-night.'
073 'I'm sure I shall send that lawyer man about
his business,' she threatened.
'Look here,' said Mark timorously as he was leaving the house,
'I've told you I don't want the money—I would give it away to
some charity; but do you think I ought to pretend to yield, just to
humour him, and let him die quiet and peaceful? I shouldn't like
him to die hating——'
'Never—never!' she exclaimed.
'What have you and Mark been talking about?' asked Edward
Beechinor apprehensively as Mary re-entered the bedroom.
'Nothing,' she replied with a grave and soothing kindliness of
tone.
'Because, miss, if you think——'
'You must have your medicine now, Edward.'
But before giving the patient his medicine she peeped through
the curtain and watched Mark's figure till it disappeared up the
hill towards Bleakridge. He, on his part, walked with her image
always in front of him. He thought hers was the strongest, most
righteous soul he had ever encountered; it seemed as if she had a
perfect passion for truth and justice. 074 And a week ago he
had deemed her a capable girl, certainly—but
lackadaisical!
The clock had struck ten before Mr. Baines, the solicitor,
knocked at the door. Mary hesitated, and then took him upstairs in
silence while he suavely explained to her why he had been unable to
come earlier. This lawyer was a young Scotsman who had descended
upon the town from nowhere, bought a small decayed practice, and
within two years had transformed it into a large and flourishing
business by one of those feats of energy, audacity, and tact,
combined, of which some Scotsmen seem to possess the secret.
'Here is Mr. Baines, Edward,' Mary said quietly; and then,
having rearranged the sick man's pillow, she vanished out of the
room and went into the kitchen.
The gas-jet there showed only a point of blue, but she did not
turn it up. Dragging an old oak rush-seated rocking-chair near to
the range, where a scrap of fire still glowed, she rocked herself
gently in the darkness.
After about half an hour Mr. Baines's voice sounded at the head
of the stairs:
075 'Miss Beechinor, will ye kindly step up? We
shall want some asseestance.'
She obeyed, but not instantly.
In the bedroom Mr. Baines, a fountain-pen between his fine white
teeth, was putting some coal on the fire. He stood up as she
entered.
'Mr. Beechinor is about to make a new will,' he said, without
removing the pen from his mouth, 'and ye will kindly witness
it.'
The small room appeared to be full of Baines—he was so
large and fleshy and assertive. The furniture, even the chest of
drawers, was dwarfed into toy-furniture, and Beechinor, slight and
shrunken-up, seemed like a cadaverous manikin in the bed.
'Now, Mr. Beechinor.' Dusting his hands, the lawyer took a
newly-written document from the dressing-table, and, spreading it
on the lid of a cardboard box, held it before the dying man.
'Here's the pen. There! I'll help ye to hold it.'
Beechinor clutched the pen. His wrinkled and yellow face,
flushed in irregular patches as though the cheeks had been badly
rouged, was covered with perspiration, and each difficult movement,
even to the slightest lifting of the 076 head, showed extreme
exhaustion. He cast at Mary a long sinister glance of mistrust and
apprehension.
'What is there in this will?'
Mr. Baines looked sharply up at the girl, who now stood at the
side of the bed opposite him. Mechanically she smoothed the tumbled
bed-clothes.
'That's nowt to do wi' thee, lass,' said Beechinor
resentfully.
'It isn't necessary that a witness to a will should be aware of
its contents,' said Baines. 'In fact, it's quite unusual.'
'I sign nothing in the dark,' she said, smiling. Through their
half-closed lids her eyes glimmered at Baines.
'Ha! Legal caution acquired from your cousin, I presume.' Baines
smiled at her. 'But let me assure ye, Miss Beechinor, this is a
mere matter of form. A will must be signed in the presence of two
witnesses, both present at the same time; and there's only yeself
and me for it.'
Mary looked at the dying man, whose features were writhed in
pain, and shook her head.
077 'Tell her,' he murmured with bitter despair,
and sank down into the pillows, dropping the fountain-pen, which
had left a stain of ink on the sheet before Baines could pick it
up.
'Well, then, Miss Beechinor, if ye must know,' Baines began with
sarcasm, 'the will is as follows: The testator—that's Mr.
Beechinor—leaves twenty guineas to his brother Mark to show
that he bears him no ill-will and forgives him. The rest of his
estate is to be realized, and the proceeds given to the North
Staffordshire Infirmary, to found a bed, which is to be called the
Beechinor bed. If there is any surplus, it is to go to the Law
Clerks' Provident Society. That is all.'
'I shall have nothing to do with it,' Mary said coldly.
'Young lady, we don't want ye to have anything to do with it. We
only desire ye to witness the signature.'
'I won't witness the signature, and I won't see it signed.'
'Damn thee, Mary! thou'rt a wicked wench,' Beechinor whispered
in hoarse, feeble tones. 078 He saw himself
robbed of the legitimate fruit of all those interminable years of
toilsome thrift. This girl by a trick would prevent him from
disposing of his own. He, Edward Beechinor, shrewd and wealthy, was
being treated like a child. He was too weak to rave, but from his
aggrieved and furious heart he piled silent curses on her. 'Go,
fetch another witness,' he added to the lawyer.
'Wait a moment,' said Baines. 'Miss Beechinor, do ye mean to say
that ye will cross the solemn wish of a dying man?'
'I mean to say I won't help a dying man to commit a crime.'
'A crime?'
'Yes,' she answered, 'a crime. Seven years ago Mr. Beechinor
willed everything to his brother Mark, and Mark ought to have
everything. Mark is his only brother—his only relation except
me. And Edward knows it isn't me wants any of his money. North
Staffordshire Infirmary indeed! It's a crime!... What business have
you,' she went on to Edward Beechinor, 'to punish Mark just
because his politics aren't——'
'That's beside the point,' the lawyer interrupted. 079 'A
testator has a perfect right to leave his property as he chooses,
without giving reasons. Now, Miss Beechinor, I must ask ye to be
judeecious.'
Mary shut her lips.
'Her'll never do it. I tell thee, fetch another witness.'
The old man sprang up in a sort of frenzy as he uttered the
words, and then fell back in a brief swoon.
Mary wiped his brow, and pushed away the wet and matted hair.
Presently he opened his eyes, moaning. Mr. Baines folded up the
will, put it in his pocket, and left the room with quick steps.
Mary heard him open the front-door and then return to the foot of
the stairs.
'Miss Beechinor,' he called, 'I'll speak with ye a moment.'
She went down.
'Do you mind coming into the kitchen?' she said, preceding him
and turning up the gas; 'there's no light in the front-room.'
He leaned up against the high mantelpiece; his frock-coat hung
to the level of the oven-knob. She had one hand on the white deal
080
table. Between them a tortoiseshell cat purred on the red-tiled
floor.
'Ye're doing a verra serious thing, Miss Beechinor. As Mr.
Beechinor's solicitor, I should just like to be acquaint with the
real reasons for this conduct.'
'I've told you.' She had a slightly quizzical look.
'Now, as to Mark,' the lawyer continued blandly, 'Mr. Beechinor
explained the whole circumstances to me. Mark as good as defied his
brother.'
'That's nothing to do with it.'
'By the way, it appears that Mark is practically engaged to be
married. May I ask if the lady is yeself?'
She hesitated.
'If so,' he proceeded, 'I may tell ye informally that I admire
the pluck of ye. But, nevertheless, that will has got to be
executed.'
'The young lady is a Miss Mellor of Hanbridge.'
'I'm going to fetch my clerk,' he said shortly. 'I can see ye're
an obstinate and unfathomable woman. I'll be back in half an
hour.'
081 When he had departed she bolted the front-door
top and bottom, and went upstairs to the dying man.
Nearly an hour elapsed before she heard a knock. Mr. Baines had
had to arouse his clerk from sleep. Instead of going down to the
front-door, Mary threw up the bedroom window and looked out. It was
a mild but starless night. Trafalgar Road was silent save for the
steam-car, which, with its load of revellers returning from
Hanbridge—that centre of gaiety—slipped rumbling down
the hill towards Bursley.
'What do you want—disturbing a respectable house at this
time of night?' she called in a loud whisper when the car had
passed. 'The door's bolted, and I can't come down. You must come in
the morning.'
'Miss Beechinor, ye will let us in—I charge ye.'
'It's useless, Mr. Baines.'
'I'll break the door down. I'm a strong man, and a determined.
Ye are carrying things too far.'
In another moment the two men heard the creak of the bolts. Mary
stood before 082 them, vaguely discernible, but a forbidding
figure.
'If you must—come upstairs,' she said coldly.
'Stay here in the passage, Arthur,' said Mr. Baines; 'I'll call
ye when I want ye;' and he followed Mary up the stairs.
Edward Beechinor lay on his back, and his sunken eyes stared
glassily at the ceiling. The skin of his emaciated face, stretched
tightly over the protruding bones, had lost all its crimson, and
was green, white, yellow. The mouth was wide open. His drawn
features wore a terribly sardonic look—a purely physical
effect of the disease; but it seemed to the two spectators that
this mean and disappointed slave of a miserly habit had by one
superb imaginative effort realized the full vanity of all human
wishes and pretensions.
'Ye can go; I shan't want ye,' said Mr. Baines, returning to the
clerk.
The lawyer never spoke of that night's business. Why should he?
To what end? Mark Beechinor, under the old will, inherited the
seven hundred pounds and the house. Miss Mellor of Hanbridge is
still Miss Mellor, her 083 hand not having been
formally sought. But Mark, secretary of the Labour Church, is
married. Miss Mellor, with a quite pardonable air of tolerant
superiority, refers to his wife as 'a strange, timid little
creature—she couldn't say Bo to a goose.'
This is a scandalous story. It scandalized the best people in
Bursley; some of them would wish it forgotten. But since I have
begun to tell it I may as well finish. Moreover, like most tales
whispered behind fans and across club-tables, it carries a high and
valuable moral. The moral—I will let you have it at
once—is that those who love in glass houses should pull down
the blinds.
I
He had got his collar on safely; it bore his name—Ellis
Carter. Strange name for a dog, perhaps; and perhaps it was even
more strange that his collar should be white. But such dogs are not
common dogs. He tied his necktie exquisitely; caressed his hair
again with two brushes; curved his young moustache, 088 and
then assumed his waistcoat and his coat; the trousers had naturally
preceded the collar. He beheld the suit in the glass, and saw that
it was good. And it was not built in London, either. There are
tailors in Bursley. And in particular there is the dog's tailor.
Ask the dog's tailor, as the dog once did, whether he can really do
as well as London, and he will smile on you with gentle pity; he
will not stoop to utter the obvious Yes. He may casually inform you
that, if he is not in London himself, the explanation is that he
has reasons for preferring Bursley. He is the social equal of all
his clients. He belongs to the dogs' club. He knows, and everybody
knows, that he is a first-class tailor with a first-class
connection, and no dog would dare to condescend to him. He is a
great creative artist; the dogs who wear his clothes may be said to
interpret his creations. Now, Ellis was a great interpretative
artist, and the tailor recognised the fact. When the tailor met
Ellis on Duck Bank greatly wearing a new suit, the scene was
impressive. It was as though Elgar had stopped to hear Paderewski
play 'Pomp and Circumstance' on the piano.
089 Ellis descended from his bedroom into the
hall, took his straw hat, chose a stick, and went out into the
portico of the new large house on the Hawkins, near Oldcastle. In
the neighbourhood of the Five Towns no road is more august, more
correct, more detached, more umbrageous, than the Hawkins. M.P.'s
live there. It is the link between the aristocratic and antique
aloofness of Oldcastle and the solid commercial prosperity of the
Five Towns. Ellis adorned the portico. Young (a bare twenty-two),
fair, handsome, smiling, graceful, well-built, perfectly groomed,
he was an admirable and a characteristic specimen of the race of
dogs which, with the modern growth of luxury and the Luxurious
Spirit, has become so marked a phenomenon in the social development
of the once barbarous Five Towns.
When old Jack Carter (reputed to be the best turner that Bursley
ever produced) started a little potbank near St. Peter's Church in
1861—he was then forty, and had saved two hundred
pounds—he little dreamt that the supreme and final result
after forty years would be the dog. But so it was. Old Jack
090
Carter had a son John Carter, who married at twenty-five and lived
at first on twenty-five shillings a week, and enthusiastically
continued the erection of the fortune which old Jack had begun. At
thirty-three, after old Jack's death, John became a Town
Councillor. At thirty-six he became Mayor and the father of Ellis,
and the recipient of a silver cradle. Ellis was his wife's maiden
name. At forty-two he built the finest earthenware manufactory in
Bursley, down by the canal-side at Shawport. At fifty-two he had
been everything that a man can be in the Five Towns—from
County Councillor to President of the Society for the Prosecution
of Felons. Then Ellis left school and came to the works to carry on
the tradition, and his father suddenly discovered him. The truth
was that John Carter had been so laudably busy with the affairs of
his town and county that he had nearly forgotten his family. Ellis,
in the process of achieving doghood, soon taught his father a thing
or two. And John learnt. John could manage a public meeting, but he
could not manage Ellis. Besides, there was plenty of money; and
Ellis was so ingratiating, 091 and had curly hair
that somehow won sympathy. And, after all, Ellis was not such a
duffer as all that at the works. John knew other people's sons who
were worse. And Ellis could keep order in the paintresses' 'shops'
as order had never been kept there before.
John sometimes wondered what old Jack would have said about
Ellis and his friends, those handsome dogs, those fine dandies, who
taught to the Five Towns the virtue of grace and of style and of
dash, who went up to London—some of them even went to Paris
—and brought back civilization to the Five Towns, who removed
from the Five Towns the reproach of being uncouth and behind the
times. Was the outcome of two generations of unremitting toil
merely Ellis? (Ellis had several pretty sisters, but they did not
count.) John could only guess at what old Jack's attitude might
have been towards Ellis—Ellis, who had his shirts made to
measure. He knew exactly what was Ellis's attitude towards the
ideals of old Jack, old Jack the class-leader, who wore clogs till
he was thirty, and dined in his shirt-sleeves at one o'clock to the
end of his life.
092 Ellis quitted the portico, ran down the
winding garden-path, and jumped neatly and fearlessly on to an
electric tramcar as it passed at the rate of fifteen miles an hour.
The car was going to Hanbridge, and it was crowded with the joy of
life; Ellis had to stand on the step. This was the Saturday before
the first Monday in August, and therefore the formal opening of
Knype Wakes, the most carnivalesque of all the carnivals which
enliven the four seasons in the Five Towns. It is still called
Knype Wakes, because once Knype overshadowed Hanbridge in
importance; but its headquarters are now quite properly at
Hanbridge, the hub, the centre, the Paris of the Five
Towns—Hanbridge, the county borough of sixty odd thousand
inhabitants. It is the festival of the masses that old Jack sprang
from, and every genteel person who can leaves the Five Towns for
the seaside at the end of July. Nevertheless, the district is never
more crammed than at Knype Wakes. And, of course, genteel persons,
whom circumstances have forced to remain in the Five Towns, sally
out in the evening to 'do' the Wakes in a spirit of tolerant
condescension. 093 Ellis was in this case. His parents and
sisters were at Llandudno, and he had been left in charge of the
works and of the new house. He was always free; he could always
pity the bondage of his sisters; but now he was more free than
ever—he was absolutely free. Imagine the delicious feeling
that surged in his heart as he prepared to plunge himself doggishly
into the wild ocean of the Wakes. By the way, in that heart was the
image of a girl.
II
He stepped off the car on the outskirts of Hanbridge, and
strolled gently and spectacularly into the joyous town. The streets
became more and more crowded and noisy as he approached the
market-place, and in Crown Square tramcars from the four quarters
of the earth discharged tramloads of humanity at the rate of two a
minute, and then glided off again empty in search of more humanity.
The lower portion of Crown Square was devoted to tramlines; in the
upper portion the Wakes began, and spread into the market-place,
and thence by many tentacles into all manner of streets.
094 No Wakes is better than Knype Wakes; that is
to say, no Wakes is more ear-splitting, more terrific, more
dizzying, or more impassable. When you go to Knype Wakes you get
stuck in the midst of an enormous crowd, and you see roundabouts,
swings, switchbacks, myrioramas, atrocity booths, quack dentists,
shooting-galleries, cocoanut-shies, and bazaars, all around you.
Every establishment is jewelled, gilded, and electrically lighted;
every establishment has an orchestra, most often played by steam
and conducted by a stoker; every establishment has a
steam—whistle, which shrieks at the beginning and at the end
of each round or performance. You stand fixed in the multitude
listening to a thousand orchestras and whistles, with the roar of
machinery and the merry din of car-bells, and the popping of rifles
for a background of noise. Your eyes are charmed by the whirling of
a million lights and the mad whirling of millions of beautiful
girls and happy youths under the lights. For the roundabouts rule
the scene; the roundabouts take the money. The supreme desire of
the revellers is to describe circles, either on horseback or in
yachts, either simple circles or complex 095 circles, either up
and down or straight along, but always circles. And it is as though
inventors had sat up at nights puzzling their brains how best to
make revellers seasick while keeping them equidistant from a
steam-orchestra.... Then the crowd solidly lurches, and you find
yourself up against a dentist, or a firm of wrestlers, or a
roundabout, or an ice-cream refectory, and you take what comes. You
have begun to 'do' the Wakes. The splendid insanity seizes you. The
lights, the colours, the explosions, the shrieks, the feathered
hats, the pretty faces as they fly past, the gilding, the statuary,
the August night, and the mingling of a thousand melodies in a
counterpoint beyond the dreams of Wagner—these things have
stirred the sap of life in you, have shown you how fine it is to be
alive, and, careless and free, have caught up your spirit into a
heaven from which you scornfully survey the year of daily toil
between one Wakes and another as the eagle scornfully surveys the
potato-field. Your nostrils dilate—nay, matters reach such a
pass that, even if you are genteel, you forget to condescend.
096
III
After Ellis had had the correct drink in the private bar up the
passage at the Turk's Head, and after he had plunged into the crowd
and got lost in it, and submitted good-humouredly to the frequent
ordeal of the penny squirt as administered by adorable creatures in
bright skirts, he found himself cast up by the human ocean on the
macadam shore near a shooting-gallery. This was no ordinary
shooting-gallery. It was one of Jenkins's affairs (Jenkins of
Manchester), and on either side of it Jenkins's Venetian gondalas
and Jenkins's Mexican mustangs were whizzing round two of Jenkins's
orchestras at twopence a time, and taking thirty-two pounds an
hour. This gallery was very different from the old galleries, in
which you leaned against a brass bar and shot up a kind of a drain.
This gallery was a large and brilliant room, with the front-wall
taken out. It was hung with mirrors and cretonnes, it was richly
carpeted, and, of course, it was lighted by electricity. Carved and
gilded tables bore a whole armoury of weapons. You shot at
tobacco-pipes, twisting 097 and stationary, at
balls poised on jets of water, and at proper targets. In the
corners of the saloon, near the open, were large crimson plush
lounges, on which you lounged after the fatigue of shooting.
A pink-clad girl, young and radiant, had the concern in
charge.
She was speeding a party of bankrupt shooters, when she caught
sight of Ellis. Ellis answered her smile, and strolled up to the
booth with a countenance that might have meant anything. You can
never tell what a dog is thinking.
''Ello!' said the girl prettily (or, rather, she shouted
prettily, having to compete with the two orchestras). 'You here
again?'
The truth was that Ellis had been there on the previous night,
when the Wakes was only half opened, and he had come again to-night
expressly in order to see her; but he would not have admitted, even
to himself, that he had come expressly in order to see her; in his
mind it was just a chance that he might see her. She was a jolly
girl. (We are gradually approaching the scandalous part.)
'What a jolly frock!' he said, when he had 098 shot five celluloid
balls in succession off a jet of water.
Smiling, she mechanically took a ball out of the basket and let
it roll down the conduit to the fountain.
'Do you think so?' she replied, smoothing the fluffy muslin
apron with her small hands, black from contact with the guns. 'That
one I wore last night was my second-best. I only wear this on
Saturdays and Mondays.'
He nodded like a connoisseur. The sixth ball had sprung up to
the top of the jet. He removed it with the certainty of a King's
Prize winner, and she complimented him.
'Ah!' he said, 'you should have seen me before I took to smoking
and drinking!'
She laughed freely. She was always showing her fine teeth. And
she had such a frank, jolly countenance, not exactly
pretty—better than pretty. She was a little short and a
little plump, and she wore a necklace round her neck, a ring on her
dainty, dirty finger, and a watch-bracelet on her wrist.
'Why!' she exclaimed. 'How old are you?'
'How old are you?' he retorted.
099 Dogs do not give things away like that.
'I'm nineteen,' she said submissively. 'At least, I shall be
come Martinmas.'
And she yawned.
'Well,' he said, 'a little girl like you ought to be in
bed.'
'Sunday to-morrow,' she observed.
'Aren't you glad you're English?' he remarked. 'If you were in
Paris you'd have to work Sundays too.'
'Not me!' she said. 'Who told you that? Have you been to
Paris?'
'No,' he admitted cautiously; 'but a friend of mine has, and he
told me. He came back only last week, and he says they keep open
Sundays, and all night sometimes. Sunday is the great day over
there.'
'Well,' said the girl kindly, 'don't you believe it. The police
wouldn't allow it. I know what the police are.'
More shooters entered the saloon. Ellis had finished his dozen;
he sank into a lounge, and elegantly lighted a cigarette, and
watched her serve the other marksmen. She was decidedly charming,
and so jolly—with him. He noticed with satisfaction that with
the 100 other marksmen she showed a certain high
reserve.
They did not stay long, and when they were gone she came across
to the lounge and gazed at him provocatively.
'Dashed if she hasn't taken a fancy to me!'
The thought ran through him like lightning.
'Well?' she said.
'What do you do with yourself Sundays?' he asked her.
'Oh, sleep.'
'All day?'
'All morning.'
'What do you do in the afternoon?'
'Oh, nothing.'
She laughed gaily.
'Come out with me, eh?'
'To-morrow? Oh, I should LOVE TO!' she cried.
Her voice expanded into large capitals because by a singular
chance both the neighbouring orchestras stopped momentarily
together, and thus gave her shout a fair field. The effect was
startling. It startled Ellis. He had not for an instant expected
that she would consent. Never, dog though he was, had he armed
101
a girl out on any afternoon, to say nothing of Sunday afternoon,
and Knype's Wakes Sunday at that! He had talked about girls at the
club. He understood the theory. But the practice——
The foundation of England's greatness is that Englishmen hate to
look fools. The fear of being taken for a ninny will spur an
Englishman to the most surprising deeds of courage. Ellis said
'Good!' with apparent enthusiasm, and arranged to be waiting for
her at half-past two at the Turk's Head. Then he left the saloon
and struck out anew into the ocean. He wanted to think it over.
Once, painful to relate, he had thoughts of failing to keep the
appointment. However, she was so jolly and frank. And what a fancy
she must have taken to him! No, he would see it through.
IV
If anybody had prophesied to Ellis that he would be driving out
a Wakes girl in a dogcart that Sunday afternoon he would have
laughed at the prophet; but so it occurred. He arrived at the
Turk's Head at two twenty-five. 102 She was there before
him, dressed all in blue, except the white shoes and stockings,
weighing herself on the machine in the yard. She showed her teeth,
told him she weighed nine stone one, and abruptly asked him if he
could drive. He said he could. She clapped her hands and sprang off
the machine. Her father had bought a new mare the day before, and
it was in the Turk's Head stable, and the yardman said it wanted
exercise, and there was a dogcart and harness idling about, and, in
short, Ellis should drive her to Sneyd Park, which she had long
desired to see.
Ellis wished to ask questions, but the moment did not seem
auspicious.
In a few minutes the new mare, a high and somewhat frisky bay,
with big shoulders, was in the shafts of a high, green dogcart.
When asked if he could drive, Ellis ought to have answered: 'That
depends—on the horse.' Many men can tool a fifteen-year-old
screw down a country lane who would hesitate to get up behind a
five-year-old animal (in need of exercise) for a spin down Broad
Street, Hanbridge, on Knype Wakes Sunday. Ellis could drive; he
could just drive. His father 103 had always
steadfastly refused to keep horses, but the fathers of other dogs
were more progressive, and Ellis had had opportunities. He knew how
to take the reins, and get up, and give the office; indeed, he had
read a handbook on the subject. So he rook the reins and got up,
and the Wakes girl got up.
He chirruped. The mare merely backed.
'Give 'er 'er mouth,' said the yardman disgustedly.
'Oh!' said Ellis, and slackened the reins, and the mare pawed
forward.
Then he had to turn her in the yard, and get her and the dogcart
down the passage. He doubted whether he should do it, for the
passage seemed a size too small. However, he did it, or the mare
did it, and the entire organism swerved across a portion of the
footpath into Broad Street.
For quite a quarter of a mile down Broad Street Ellis blushed,
and kept his gaze between the mare's ears. However, the mare went
beautifully. You could have driven her with a silken thread, so it
seemed. And then the dog, growing accustomed to his prominence up
there on the dogcart, began to be a bit 104 doggy. He knew the
little thing's age and weight, but, really, when you take a girl
out for a Sunday spin you want more information about her than
that. Her asked her name, and her name was Jenkins—Ada. She
was the great Jenkins's daughter.
('Oh,' thought Ellis, 'the deuce you are!')
'Father's gone to Manchester for the day, and aunt's looking
after me,' said Ada.
'Do they know you've come out—like this?'
'Not much!' She laughed deliciously. 'How lovely it is!'
At Knype they drew up before the Five Towns Hotel and descended.
The Five Towns Hotel is the greatest hotel in North Staffordshire.
It has two hundred rooms. It would not entirely disgrace
Northumberland Avenue. In the Five Towns it is august, imposing,
and unique. They had a lemonade there, and proceeded. A clock
struck; it was a near thing. No more refreshments now until they
had passed the three-mile limit!
Yes! Not two hundred yards further on she spied an ice-cream
shop in Fleet Road, 105 and Ellis learnt that she adored ice-cream.
The mare waited patiently outside in the thronged street.
After that the pilgrimage to Sneyd was punctuated with
ice-creams. At the Stag at Sneyd (where, among ninety-and-nine
dogcarts, Ellis's dogcart was the brightest green of them all) Ada
had another lemonade, and Ellis had something else. They saw the
Park, and Ada giggled charmingly her appreciation of its beauty.
The conversation throughout consisted chiefly of Ada's teeth. Ellis
said he would return by a different route, and he managed to get
lost. How anyone driving to Hanbridge from Sneyd could arrive at
the mining village of Silverton is a mystery. But Ellis arrived
there, and he ultimately came out at Hillport, the aristocratic
suburb of Bursley, where he had always lived till the last year. He
feared recognition there, and his fear was justified. Some silly
ass, a schoolmate, cried, 'Go it!' as the machine bowled along, and
the mischief was that the mare, startled, went it. She went it down
the curving hill, and the vehicle after her, like a kettle tied to
a dog's tail.
Ellis winked stoutly at Ada when they 106 reached the bottom,
and gave the mare a piece of his mind, to which she objected. As
they crossed the railway-bridge a goods-train ran underneath and
puffed smoke into the mare's eyes. She set her ears back.
'Would you!' cried Ellis authoritatively, and touched her with
the whip (he had forgotten the handbook).
He scarcely touched her, but you never know where you are with
any horse. That mare, which had been a mirror of all the virtues
all the afternoon, was off like a rocket. She overtook an electric
car as if it had been standing still. Ellis sawed her mouth; he
might as well have sawed the funnel of a locomotive. He had meant
to turn off and traverse Bursley by secluded streets, but he
perceived that safety lay solely in letting her go straight ahead
up the very steep slope of Oldcastle Street into the middle of the
town. It would be an amazing mare that galloped to the top of
Oldcastle Street! She galloped nearly to the top, and then Ellis
began to get hold of her a bit.
'Don't be afraid,' he said masculinely to Ada.
107 And, conscious of victory, he jerked the mare
to the left to avoid an approaching car....
The next instant they were anchored against the roots of a
lamp-post. When Ellis saw the upper half of the lamp-post bent down
at right angles, and pieces of glass covering the pavement, he
could not believe that he and his dogcart had done that, especially
as neither the mare, nor the dogcart, nor its freight, was damaged.
The machine was merely jammed, and the mare, satisfied, stood
quiet, breathing rapidly.
But Ada Jenkins was crying.
And the car stopped a moment to observe. And then a number of
chapel-goers on their way to the Sytch Chapel, which the Carter
family still faithfully attended, joined the scene; and then a
policeman.
Ellis sat like a stuck pig in the dogcart. He knew that speech
was demanded of him, but he did not know where to begin.
The worst thing of all was the lamp-post, bent, moveless,
unnatural, atrociously comic, accusing him.
The affair was over the town in a minute; 108 the next morning it
reached Llandudno. Ellis Carter had been out on the spree with a
Wakes girl in a dogcart on Sunday afternoon, and had got into
such a condition that he had driven into a lamp-post at the top of
Oldcastle Street just as people were going into chapel.
The lamp-post remained bent for three days—a fearful
warning to all dogs that doggishness has limits.
If it had not been a dogcart, and such a high, green dogcart; if
it had been, say, a brougham, or even a cab! If it had not been
Sunday! And, granting Sunday, if it had not been just as people
were going into chapel! If he had not chosen that particular
lamp-post, visible both from the market-place and St. Luke's
Square! If he had only contrived to destroy a less obtrusive
lamp-post in some unfrequented street! And if it had not been a
Wakes girl—if the reprobate had only selected for his guilty
amours an actress from one of the touring companies, or even a star
from the Hanbridge Empire—yea, or even a local barmaid! But
a Wakes girl!
Ellis himself saw the enormity of his transgression. 109 He lay
awake astounded by his own doggishness.
And yet he had seldom felt less doggy than during that trip. It
seemed to him that doggishness was not the glorious thing he had
thought. However, he cut a heroic figure at the dogs' club. Every
admiring face said: 'Well, you have been going the pace! We
always knew you were a hot un, but, really——'
V
On the following Friday evening, when Ellis jumped off the car
opposite his home on the Hawkins, he saw in the road, halted, a
train of vast and queer-shaped waggons in charge of two
traction-engines. They were painted on all sides with the great
name of Jenkins. They contained Jenkins's roundabouts and
shooting-saloons, on their way to rouse the joy of life in other
towns. And he perceived in front of the portico the high, green
dogcart and the lamp-post-destroying mare.
He went in. The family had come home that afternoon. Sundry of
his sisters greeted 110 him with silent horror on their faces in the
hall. In the breakfast-room, which gave off the drawing-room, was
his mother in the attitude of an intent listener. She spoke no
word.
And Ellis listened, too.
'Yes,' a very powerful and raucous voice was saying in the
drawing-room, 'I reckoned I'd call and tell ye myself, Mister
Carter, what I thought on it. My gell, a motherless gell, but
brought up respectable; sixth standard at Whalley Range Board
School; and her aunt a strict God-fearing woman! And here your son
comes along and gets hold of the girl while her aunt's at the
special service for Wakes folks in Bethesda Chapel, and runs off
with her in my dogcart with one of my hosses, and raises a scandal
all o'er the Five Towns. God bless my soul, mister! I tell'n ye I
hardly liked to open o' Monday afternoon, I was that ashamed! And I
packed Ada off to Manchester. It seems to me that if the upper
classes, as they call 'em—the immoral classes I call
'em—'ud look after themselves a bit instead o' looking after
other people so much, things might be a bit better, Mister Carter.
I dare say you 111 think it's nothing as your son should go about
ruining the reputation of any decent, respectable girl as he
happens to fancy, Mister Carter; but this is what I say. I
say——'
Mr. Carter was understood to assert, in his most pacific and
pained public-meeting voice, that he regretted, infinitely
regretted——
Mrs. Carter, weeping, ran out of the breakfast-room.
And soon afterwards the traction-engines rumbled off, and the
high, green dogcart followed them.
Ellis sat spell-bound.
He heard the parlourmaid go into the drawing-room and announce,
'Tea is ready, sir!' and then his father's dry cough.
And then the parlourmaid came into the breakfast-room: 'Tea is
ready, Mr. Ellis!'
Oh, the meal!
When Clive Timmis paused at the side-door of Ezra Brunt's great
shop in Machin Street, and the door was opened to him by Ezra
Brunt's daughter before he had had time to pull the bell, not only
all Machin Street knew it within the hour, but also most persons of
consequence left in Hanbridge on a Thursday
afternoon—Thursday being early-closing day. For Hanbridge,
though it counts sixty thousand inhabitants, and is the chief of
the Five Towns—that vast, huddled congeries of boroughs
devoted to the manufacture of earthenware—is a place where
the art of attending to other people's business still flourishes in
rustic perfection.
Ezra Brunt's drapery establishment was the foremost retail
house, in any branch of trade, of the Five Towns. It had no rival
nearer than Manchester, thirty-six miles off; and
116 even Manchester
could exhibit nothing conspicuously superior to it. The most
acutely critical shoppers of the Five Towns—women who were in
the habit of going to London every year for the January
sales—spoke of Brunt's as a 'right-down good shop.' And the
husbands of these ladies, manufacturers who employed from two
hundred to a thousand men, regarded Ezra Brunt as a commercial
magnate of equal importance with themselves. Brunt, who had served
his apprenticeship at Birmingham, started business in Machin Street
in 1862, when Hanbridge was half its present size and all the best
shops of the district were in Oldcastle, an ancient burg contiguous
with, but holding itself proudly aloof from, the industrial Five
Towns. He paid eighty pounds a year rent, and lived over the shop,
and in the summer quarter his gas bill was always under a
sovereign. For ten years success tarried, but in 1872 his daughter
Eva was born and his wife died, and from that moment the sun of his
prosperity climbed higher and higher into heaven. He had been
profoundly attached to his wife, and, having lost her he abandoned
himself to the mercantile struggle with that 117 morose and terrible
ferocity which was the root of his character. Of rude, gaunt
aspect, gruffly taciturn by nature, and variable in temper, he yet
had the precious instinct for soothing customers. To this day he
can surpass his own shop-walkers in the admirable and tender
solicitude with which, forsaking dialect, he drops into a lady's
ear his famous stereotyped phrase: 'Are you receiving proper
attention, madam?' From the first he eschewed the facile trickeries
and ostentations which allure the populace. He sought a high-class
trade, and by waiting he found it. He would never advertise on
hoardings; for many years he had no signboard over his shop-front;
and whereas the name of 'Bostocks,' the huge cheap drapers lower
down Machin Street, on the opposite side, attacks you at every
railway-station and in every tramcar, the name of 'E. Brunt' is to
be seen only in a modest regular advertisement on the front page of
the Staffordshire Signal. Repose, reticence,
respectability—it was these attributes which he decided his
shop should possess, and by means of which he succeeded. To enter
Brunt's, with its silently swinging doors, its broad, easy
staircases, its long floors 118 covered with warm,
red linoleum, its partitioned walls, its smooth mahogany counters,
its unobtrusive mirrors, its rows of youths and virgins in black,
and its pervading atmosphere of quietude and discretion, was like
entering a temple before the act of oblation has commenced. You
were conscious of some supreme administrative influence everywhere
imposing itself. That influence was Ezra Brunt. And yet the man
differed utterly from the thing he had created. His was one of
those dark and passionate souls which smoulder in this harsh
Midland district as slag-heaps smoulder on the pit-banks, revealing
their strange fires only in the darkness.
In 1899 Brunt's establishment occupied four shops, Nos. 52, 56,
58, and 60, in Machin Street. He had bought the freeholds at a
price which timid people regarded as exorbitant, but the solicitors
of Hanbridge secretly applauded his enterprise and shrewdness in
anticipating the enormous rise in ground-values which has now been
in rapid, steady progress there for more than a decade. He had
thrown the interiors together and rebuilt the frontages in handsome
freestone. He had also purchased 119 several shops
opposite, and rumour said that it was his intention to offer these
latter to the Town Council at a low figure if the Council would cut
a new street leading from his premises to the Market Square. Such a
scheme would have met with general approval. But there was one
serious hiatus in the plans of Ezra Brunt—to wit, No. 54,
Machin Street. No. 54, separating 52 and 56, was a chemist's shop,
shabby but sedate as to appearance, owned and occupied by George
Christopher Timmis, a mild and venerable citizen, and a local
preacher in the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion. For nearly thirty
years Brunt had coveted Mr. Timmis's shop; more than twenty years
have elapsed since he first opened negotiations for it. Mr. Timmis
was by no means eager to sell—indeed, his attitude was
distinctly a repellent one—but a bargain would undoubtedly
have been concluded had not a report reached the ears of Mr. Timmis
to the effect that Ezra Brunt had remarked at the Turk's Head that
'th' old leech was only sticking out for every brass farthing he
could get.' The report was untrue, but Mr. Timmis believed it, and
from that moment Ezra Brunt's 120 chances of obtaining
the chemist's shop vanished completely. His lawyer expended
diplomacy in vain, raising the offer week by week till the
incredible sum of three thousand pounds was reached. Then Ezra
Brunt himself saw Mr. Timmis, and without a word of prelude
said:
'Will ye take three thousand guineas for this bit o'
property?'
'Not thirty thousand guineas,' said Mr. Timmis quietly; the
stern pride of the benevolent old local preacher had been
aroused.
'Then be damned to you!' said Ezra Brunt, who had never been
known to swear before.
Thenceforth a feud existed, not less bitter because it was a
feud in which nothing was said and nothing done—a silent and
implacable mutual resistance. The sole outward sign of it was the
dirty and stumpy brown-brick shop-front of Mr. Timmis, squeezed in
between those massive luxurious façades of stone which Ezra
Brunt soon afterwards erected. The pharmaceutical business of Mr.
Timmis was not a very large one, and, fiscally, Ezra Brunt could
have swallowed him at a meal and suffered no inconvenience; but in
that the aged chemist had lived on just half his
121 small income for
some fifty years past, his position was impregnable. Hanbridge
smiled cynically at this impasse produced by an idle word,
and, recognising the equality of the antagonists, leaned neither to
one side nor to the other. At intervals, however, the legend of the
feud was embroidered with new and effective detail in the mouth of
some inventive gossip, and by degrees it took high place among
those piquant social histories which illustrate the real life of a
town, and which parents recount to their children with such zest in
moods of reminiscence.
When George Christopher Timmis buried his wife, Ezra Brunt, as a
near neighbour, was asked to the funeral. 'The cortège will
move at 1.30,' ran the printed invitation, and at 1.15 Brunt's
carriage was decorously in place behind the hearse and the two
mourning-coaches. The demeanour of the chemist and the draper
towards each other was a sublime answer to the demands of the
occasion; some people even said that the breach had been healed,
but these were not of the discerning.
The most active person at the funeral was the chemist's only
nephew, Clive Timmis, 122 partner in a small
but prosperous firm of majolica manufacturers at Bursley. Clive,
who was seldom seen in Hanbridge, made a favourable impression on
everyone by his pleasing, unaffected manner and his air of
discretion and success. He was a bachelor of thirty-two, and lived
in lodgings at Bursley. On the return of the funeral-party from the
cemetery, Clive Timmis found Brunt's daughter Eva in his uncle's
house. Uninvited, she had left her place in the private room at her
father's shop in order to assist Timmis's servant Sarah in the
preparation of that solid and solemn repast which must inevitably
follow every proper interment in the Five Towns. Without false
modesty, she introduced herself to one or two of the men who had
surprised her at her work, and then quietly departed just as they
were sitting down to table and Sarah had brought in the hot
tea-cakes. Clive Timmis saw her only for a moment, but from that
moment she was his one thought. During the evening, which he spent
alone with his uncle, he behaved in every particular as a nephew
should, yet he was acting a part; his real self roved after Ezra
Brunt's daughter, wherever she might be. 123 Clive had never
fallen in love, though several times in his life he had tried hard
to do so. He had long wished to marry—wished ardently; he had
even got into the way of regarding every woman he met—and he
met many—in the light of a possible partner. 'Can it be
she? he had asked himself a thousand times, and then
answered half sadly, 'No.' Not one woman had touched his
imagination, coincided with his dream. It is strange that after
seeing Eva Brunt he forgot thus to interrogate himself. For a
fortnight, while he went his ways as usual, her image occupied his
heart, throwing that once orderly chamber into the wildest
confusion; and he let it remain, dimly aware of some delicious
danger. He inspected the image every night before he slept, and
every morning when he awoke, and made no effort to define its
distracting charm; he knew only that Eva Brunt was absolutely and
in every detail unlike all other women. On the second Sunday he
murmured during the sermon: 'But I only saw her for a minute.' A
few days afterwards he took the tram to Hanbridge.
'Uncle,' he said, 'how should you like me to come and live here
with you? I've been 124 thinking things out a bit, and I thought
perhaps you'd like it. I expect you must feel rather lonely
now.'
The neat, fragrant shop was empty, and the two men stood behind
the big glass-fronted case of Burroughs and Wellcome's
preparations. Clive's venerable uncle happened to be looking into a
drawer marked 'Gentianæ Rad. Pulv.' He closed the drawer with
slow hesitation, and then, stroking his long white beard, replied
in that deliberate voice which seemed always to tremble with
religious fervour:
'The hand of the Lord is in this thing, Clive. I have wished
that you might come to live here with me. But I was afraid it would
be too far from the works.'
'Pooh! that's nothing,' said Clive.
As he lingered at the shop door for the Bursley car to pass the
end of Machin Street, Eva Brunt went by. He raised his hat with
diffidence, and she smiled. It was a marvellous chance. His heart
leapt into a throb which was half agony and half delight.
'I am in love,' he said gravely.
He had just discovered the fact, and the discovery filled him
with exquisite apprehension.
125 If he had waited till the age of thirty-two
for that springtime of the soul which we call love, Clive had not
waited for nothing. Eva was a woman to enravish the heart of a man
whose imagination could pierce the agitating secrets immured in
that calm and silent bosom. Slender and scarcely tall, she belonged
to the order of spare, slight-made women, who hide within their
slim frames an endowment of profound passion far exceeding that of
their more voluptuously-formed sisters, who never coarsen into
stoutness, and who at forty are as disturbing as at twenty. At this
date Eva was twenty-six. She had a rather small, white face, which
was a mask to the casual observer, and the very mirror of her
feelings to anyone with eyes to read its signs.
'I tell you what you are like,' said Clive to her once: 'you are
like a fine racehorse, always on the quiver.'
Yet many people considered her cold and impassive. Her walk and
bearing showed a sensitive independence, and when she spoke it was
usually in tones of command. The girls in the shop, where she was a
power second only to Ezra Brunt, were a little afraid of her,
126
chiefly because she poured terrible scorn on their small
affectations, jealousies, and vendettas. But they liked her
because, in their own phrase, 'there was no nonsense about' this
redoubtable woman. She hated shams and make-believes with a bitter
and ruthless hatred. She was the heiress to at least five thousand
a year, and knew it well, but she never encouraged her father to
complicate their simple mode of life with the pomps of wealth. They
lived in a house with a large garden at Pireford, which is on the
summit of the steep ridge between the Five Towns and Oldcastle, and
they kept two servants and a coachman, who was also gardener. Eva
paid the servants good wages, and took care to get good value
therefor.
'It's not often I have any bother with my servants,' she would
say, 'for they know that if there is any trouble I would just as
soon clear them out and put on an apron and do the work
myself.'
She was an accomplished house-mistress, and could bake her own
bread: in towns not one woman in a thousand can bake. With the
coachman she had little to do, for she could 127 not rid herself of a
sentimental objection to the carriage—it savoured of 'airs';
when she used it she used it as she might use a tramcar. It was her
custom, every day except Saturday, to walk to the shop about eleven
o'clock, after her house had been set in order. She had been
thoroughly trained in the business, and had spent a year at a
first-rate shop in High Street, Kensington. Millinery was her
speciality, and she still watched over that department with a
particular attention; but for some time past she had risen beyond
the limitations of departments, and assisted her father in the
general management of the vast concern. In commercial aptitude she
resembled the typical Frenchwoman.
Although he was her father, Ezra Brunt had the wit to recognise
her talents, and he always listened to her suggestions, which,
however, sometimes startled him. One of them was that he should
import into the Five Towns a modiste from Paris, offering a salary
of two hundred a year. The old provincial stood aghast. He had the
idea that all Parisian women were stage-dancers. And to pay four
pounds a week to a female!
128 Nevertheless, Mademoiselle Bertot—styled
in the shop 'Madame'—now presides over Ezra Brunt's
dressmakers, draws her four pounds a week (of which she saves two),
and by mere nationality has given a unique distinction and success
to her branch of the business.
Eva occupied a small room opening off the principal showroom,
and during hours of work she issued thence but seldom. Only
customers of the highest importance might speak with her. She was a
power felt rather than seen. Employés who knocked at her
door always did so with a certain awe of what awaited them on the
other side, and a consciousness that the moment was unsuitable for
levity. 'If you please, Miss Eva——'. Here she gave
audience to the 'buyers' and window-dressers, listened to
complaints and excuses, and occasionally had a secret orgy of
afternoon tea with one or two of her friends. None but these few
girls—mostly younger than herself, and remarkable only in
that their dislike of the snobbery of the Five Towns, though less
fiercely displayed, agreed with her own—really knew Eva. To
them alone did she unveil herself, and by them she was
idolized.
129 'She is simply splendid when you know
her—such a jolly girl!' they would say to other people; but
other people, especially other women, could not believe it. They
fearfully respected her because she was very well dressed and had
quantities of money. But they called her 'a curious creature'; it
was inconceivable to them that she should choose to work in a shop;
and her tongue had a causticity which was sometimes exceedingly
disconcerting and mortifying. As for men, she was shy of them, and,
moreover, she loathed the elaborate and insincere ritual of
deference which the average man practises towards women unrelated
to him, particularly when they are young and rich. Her father she
adored, without knowing it; for he often angered her, and
humiliated her in private. As for the rest, she was, after all,
only six-and-twenty.
'If you don't mind, I should like to walk along with you,' Clive
Timmis said to her one Sunday evening in the porch of the Bethesda
Chapel.
'I shall be glad,' she answered at once; 'father isn't here, and
I'm all alone.'
Ezra Brunt was indeed seldom there, counting
130 in the matter of
attendance at chapel among what were called 'the weaker
brethren.'
'I am going over to Oldcastle,' Clive explained calmly.
So began the formal courtship—more than a month after
Clive had settled in Machin Street, for he was far too discreet to
engender by precipitancy any suspicion in the haunts of scandal
that his true reason for establishing himself in his uncle's
household was a certain rich young woman who was to be found every
day next door. Guided as much by instinct as by tact, Clive
approached Eva with an almost savage simplicity and naturalness of
manner, ignoring not only her father's wealth, but all the feigned
punctilio of a wooer. His face said: 'Let there be no beating about
the bush—I like you.' Hers answered: 'Good! we will see.'
From the first he pleased her, and not least in treating her
exactly as she would have wished to be treated—namely, as a
quite plain person of that part of the middle class which is
neither upper nor lower. Few men in the Five Towns would have been
capable of forgetting Ezra Brunt's income in talking to 131 Ezra
Brunt's daughter. Fortunately, Timmis had a proud, confident
spirit—the spirit of one who, unaided, has wrested success
from the world's deathlike clutch. Had Eva the reversion of fifty
thousand a year instead of five, he, Clive, was still a prosperous
plain man, well able to support a wife in the position to which God
had called him.
Their walks together grew more and more frequent, and they
became intimate, exchanging ideas and rejoicing openly at the
similarity of those ideas. Although there was no concealment in
these encounters, still, there was a circumspection which resembled
the clandestine. By a silent understanding Clive did not enter the
house at Pireford; to have done so would have excited remark, for
this house, unlike some, had never been the rendezvous of young
men; much less, therefore, did he invade the shop. No! The chief
part of their love-making (for such it was, though the term would
have roused Eva's contemptuous anger) occurred in the streets; in
this they did but follow the traditions of their class. Thus, the
idyll, so matter-of-fact upon the surface, but within which glowed
secret and adorable fires, 132 progressed towards
its culmination. Eva, the artless fool—oh, how simple are the
wisest at times!—thought that the affair was hid from the
shop. But was it possible? Was it possible that in those tiny
bedrooms on the third floor, where the heavy evening hours were
ever lightened with breathless interminable recitals of what some
'he' had said and some 'she' had replied, such an enthralling
episode should escape discovery? The dormitories knew of Eva's
'attachment' before Eva herself. Yet none knew how it was known.
The whisper arose like Venus from a sea of trivial gossip,
miraculously, exquisitely. On the night when the first rumour of it
traversed the passages there was scarcely any sleep at Brunt's,
while Eva up at Pireford slumbered as a young girl.
On the Thursday afternoon with which we began, Brunt's was
deserted save for the housekeeper and Eva, who was writing letters
in her room.
'I saw you from my window, coming up the street,' she said to
Clive, 'and so I ran down to open the door. Will you come into
father's room? He is in Manchester for the day, buying.
133 'I knew that,' said Timmis.
'How did you know?' She observed that his manner was somewhat
nervous and constrained.
'You yourself told me last night—don't you remember?'
'So I did.'
'That's why I sent the note round this morning to say I'd call
this afternoon. You got it, I suppose?'
She nodded thoughtfully.
'Well, what is this business you want to talk about?'
It was spoken with a brave carelessness, but he caught the
tremor in her voice, and saw her little hand shake as it lay on the
table amid her father's papers. Without knowing why he should do
so, he stepped hastily forward and seized that hand. Her emotion
unmanned him. He thought he was going to cry; he could not account
for himself.
'Eva,' he said thickly, 'you know what the business is; you
know, don't you?'
She smiled. That smile, the softness of her hand, the sparkle in
her eye, the heave of her small bosom ... it was the divinest
miracle! 134 Clive, manufacturer of majolica, went hot and
then cold, and then his wits were suddenly his own again.
'That's all right,' he murmured, and sighed, and placed on Eva's
lips the first kiss that had ever lain there.
'Dear boy,' she said later, 'you should have come up to
Pireford, not here, and when father was there.'
'Should I?' he answered happily. 'It just occurred to me all of
a sudden this morning that you would be here, and that I couldn't
wait.'
'You will come up to-night and see father?'
'I had meant to.'
'You had better go home now.'
'Had I?'
She nodded, putting her lips tightly together—a trick of
hers.
'Come up about half-past eight.'
'Good! I will let myself out.'
He left her, and she gazed dreamily at the window, which looked
on to a whitewashed yard. The next moment someone else entered the
room with heavy footsteps. She turned round a little startled.
135 It was her father.
'Why! You are back early, father! How——' She
stopped. Something in the old man's glance gave her a premonition
of disaster. To this day she does not know what accident brought
him from Manchester two hours sooner than usual, and to Machin
Street instead of Pireford.
'Has young Timmis been here?' he inquired curtly.
'Yes.'
'Ha!' with subdued, sinister satisfaction, 'I saw him going out.
He didna see me.' Ezra Brunt deposited his hat and sat down.
Intimate with all her father's various moods, she saw instantly
and with terrible certainty that a series of chances had fatally
combined themselves against her. If only she had not happened to
tell Clive that her father would be at Manchester this day! If only
her father had adhered to his customary hour of return! If only
Clive had had the sense to make his proposal openly at Pireford
some evening! If only he had left a little earlier! If only her
father had not caught him going out by the side-door on a Thursday
afternoon when the 136 place was empty! Here, she guessed, was the
suggestion of furtiveness which had raised her father's unreasoning
anger, often fierce, and always incalculable.
'Clive Timmis has asked me to marry him, father.'
'Has he!'
'Surely you must have known, father, that he and I were seeing
each other a great deal.'
'Not from your lips, my girl.'
'Well, father——' Again she stopped, this strong and
capable woman, gifted with a fine brain to organize and a powerful
will to command. She quailed, robbed of speech, before the
causeless, vindictive, and infantile wrath of an old man who
happened to be in a bad temper. She actually felt like a naughty
schoolgirl before him. Such is the tremendous influence of lifelong
habit, the irresistible power of the patria potestas when it
has never been relaxed. Ezra Brunt saw in front of him only a
cowering child. 'Clive is coming up to see you to-night,' she went
on timidly, clearing her throat.
'Humph! Is he?'
The rosy and tender dream of five minutes ago lay in fragments
at Eva's feet. She brooded 137 with stricken
apprehension upon the forms of obstruction which his despotism
might choose.
The next morning Clive and his uncle breakfasted together as
usual in the parlour behind, the chemist's shop.
'Uncle,' said Clive brusquely, when the meal was nearly
finished, 'I'd better tell you that I've proposed to Eva
Brunt.'
Old George Timmis lowered the Manchester Guardian and
gazed at Clive over his steel-rimmed spectacles.
'She is a good girl,' he remarked; 'she will make you a good
wife. Have you spoken to her father?'
'That's the point. I saw him last night, and I'll tell you what
he said. These were his words: "You can marry my daughter, Mr.
Timmis, when your uncle agrees to part with his shop!"'
'That I shall never do, nephew,' said the aged patriarch quietly
and deliberately.
'Of course you won't, uncle. I shouldn't think of suggesting it.
I'm merely telling you what he said.' Clive laughed harshly. 'Why,'
he added, 'the man must be mad!'
138 'What did the young woman say to that?' his
uncle inquired.
Clive frowned.
'I didn't see her last night,' he said. 'I didn't ask to see
her. I was too angry.'
Just then the post arrived, and there was a letter for Clive,
which he read and put carefully in his waistcoat pocket.
'Eva writes asking me to go to Pireford to-night,' he said,
after a pause. 'I'll soon settle it, depend on that. If Ezra Brunt
refuses his consent, so much the worse for him. I wonder whether he
actually imagines that a grown man and a grown woman are to be....
Ah well, I can't talk about it! It's too silly. I'll be off to the
works.'
When Clive reached Pireford that night, Eva herself opened the
door to him. She was wearing a gray frock, and over it a large
white apron, perfectly plain.
'My girls are both out to-night,' she said, 'and I was making
some puffs for the sewing-meeting tea. Come into the
breakfast-room.... This way,' she added, guiding him. He had
entered the house on the previous night for the first time. She
spoke hurriedly, and, 139 instead of stopping
in the breakfast-room, wandered uncertainly through it into the
greenhouse, to which it gave access by means of a French window. In
the dark, confined space, amid the close-packed blossoms, they
stood together. She bent down to smell at a musk-plant. He took her
hand and drew her soft and yielding form towards him and kissed her
warm face.
'Oh, Clive!' she said. 'Whatever are we to do?'
'Do?' he replied, enchanted by her instinctive feminine
surrender and reliance upon him, which seemed the more precious in
that creature so proud and reserved to all others. 'Do! Where is
your father?'
'Reading the Signal in the dining-room.'
Every business man in the Five Towns reads the Staffordshire
Signal from beginning to end every night.
'I will see him. Of course he is your father; but I will just
tell him—as decently as I can—that neither you nor I
will stand this nonsense.'
'You mustn't—you mustn't see him.'
'Why not?'
140 'It will only lead to unpleasantness.'
'That can't be helped.'
'He never, never changes when once he has said a thing. I
know him.'
Clive was arrested by something in her tone, something new to
him, that in its poignant finality seemed to have caught up and
expressed in a single instant that bitterness of a lifetime's
renunciation which falls to the lot of most women.
'Will you come outside?' he asked in a different voice.
Without replying, she led the way down the long garden, which
ended in an ivy-grown brick wall and a panorama of the immense
valley of industries below. It was a warm, cloudy evening. The last
silver tinge of an August twilight lay on the shoulder of the hill
to the left. There was no moon, but the splendid watch-fires of
labour flamed from ore-heap and furnace across the whole expanse,
performing their nightly miracle of beauty. Trains crept with
noiseless mystery along the middle distance, under their canopies
of yellow steam. Further off the far-extending streets of Hanbridge
made a map of starry lines on 141 the blackness. To
the south-east stared the cold, blue electric lights of Knype
railway-station. All was silent, save for a distant thunderous
roar, the giant breathing of the forge at Cauldon Bar
Ironworks.
Eva leaned both elbows on the wall and looked forth.
'Do you mean to say,' said Clive, 'that Mr. Brunt will actually
stick by what he has said?'
'Like grim death,' said Eva.
'But what's his idea?'
'Oh! how can I tell you?' she burst out passionately.
'Perhaps I did wrong. Perhaps I ought to have warned him
earlier—said to him, "Father, Clive Timmis is courting me!"
Ugh! He cannot bear to be surprised about anything. But yet he must
have known.... It was all an accident, Clive—all an accident.
He saw you leaving the shop yesterday. He would say he
caught you leaving the shop—sneaking off
like——'
'But, Eva——'
'I know—I know! Don't tell me! But it was that, I am sure.
He would resent the 142 mere look of things, and then he would think
and think, and the notion of your uncle's shop would occur to him
again, after all these years. I can see his thoughts as plain ...
My dear, if he had not seen you at Machin Street yesterday, or if
you had seen him and spoken to him, all might have gone right. He
would have objected, but he would have given way in a day or two.
Now he will never give way! I asked you just now what was to be
done, but I knew all the time that there was nothing.'
'There is one thing to be done, Eva, and the sooner the
better.'
'Do you mean that old Mr. Timmis must give up his shop to my
father? Never! never!'
'I mean,' said Clive quietly, 'that we must marry without your
father's consent.'
She shook her head slowly and sadly, relapsing into
calmness.
'You shake your head, Eva, but it must be so.'
'I can't, my dear.'
'Do you mean to say that you will allow your father's childish
whim—for it's nothing 143 else; he can't find
any objection to me as a husband for you, and he knows
it—that you will allow his childish whim to spoil your life
and mine? Remember, you are twenty-six and I am thirty-two.'
'I can't do it! I daren't! I'm mad with myself for feeling like
this, but I daren't! And even if I dared I wouldn't. Clive, you
don't know! You can't tell how it is!'
Her sorrowful, pathetic firmness daunted him. She was now
composed, mistress again of herself, and her moral force dominated
him.
'Then, you and I are to be unhappy all our lives, Eva?'
The soft influences of the night seemed to direct her voice as,
after a long pause, she uttered the words: 'No one is ever quite
unhappy in all this world.' There was another pause, as she gazed
steadily down into the wonderful valley. 'We must wait.'
'Wait!' echoed Clive with angry grimness. 'He will live for
twenty years!'
'No one is ever quite unhappy in all this world,' she repeated
dreamily, as one might turn over a treasure in order to examine
it.
144 Now for the epilogue to the feud. Two years
passed, and it happened that there was to be a Revival at the
Bethesda Chapel. One morning the superintendent minister and the
revivalist called on Ezra Brunt at his shop. When informed of their
presence, the great draper had an impulse of anger, for, like many
stouter chapel-goers than himself, he would scarcely tolerate the
intrusion of religion into commerce. However, the visit had an air
of ceremony, and he could not decline to see these ambassadors of
heaven in his private room. The revivalist, a cheery, shrewd man,
whose powers of organization were obvious, and who seemed to put
organization before everything else, pleased Ezra Brunt at
once.
'We want a specially good congregation at the opening meeting
to-night,' said the revivalist. 'Now, the basis of a good
congregation must necessarily be the regular pillars of the church,
and therefore we are making a few calls this morning to insure the
presence of our chief men—the men of influence and position.
You will come, Mr. Brunt, and you will let it be known among your
employés that they will please you by coming too?'
145 Ezra Brunt was by no means a regular pillar of
the Bethesda, but he had a vague sensation of flattery, and he
consented; indeed, there was no alternative.
The first hymn was being sung when he reached the chapel. To his
surprise, he found the place crowded in every part. A man whom he
did not know led him to a wooden form which had been put in the
space between the front pews and the Communion-rail. He felt
strange there, and uneasy, apprehensive.
The usual discreet somnolence of the chapel had been disturbed
as by some indecorous but formidable awakener; the air was
electric; anything might occur. Ezra was astounded by the mere
volume of the singing; never had he heard such singing. At the end
of the hymn the congregation sat down, hiding their faces in
expectation. The revivalist stood erect and terrible in the pulpit,
no longer a shrewd, cheery man of the world, but the very
mouthpiece of the wrath and mercy of God. Ezra's self-importance
dwindled before that gaze, till, from a renowned magnate of the
Five Towns, he became an item in the multitude
146 of suppliants. He
profoundly wished he had never come.
'Remember the hymn,' said the revivalist, with austere
emphasis:
'"My richest gain I count but
loss, And pour contempt on all my
pride."'
The admirable histrionic art with which he intensified the
consonants in the last line produced a tremendous effect. Not for
nothing was this man cerebrated throughout Methodism as a saver of
souls. When, after a pause, he raised his hand and ejaculated, 'Let
us pray,' sobs could be heard throughout the chapel. The Revival
had begun.
At the end of a quarter of an hour Ezra Brunt would have given
fifty pounds to be outside, but he could not stir; he was
magnetized. Soon the revivalist came down from the pulpit and stood
within the Communion-rail, whence he addressed the nearmost part of
the people in low, soothing tones of persuasion. Apparently he
ignored Ezra Brunt, but the man was convicted of sin, and felt
himself melting like an icicle in front of a fire. He recalled the
days of his youth, the piety of his father and mother, 147 and the
long traditions of a stern Dissenting family. He had backslidden,
slackened in the use of the means of grace, run after the things of
this world. It is true that none of his chiefest iniquities
presented themselves to him; he was quite unconscious of them even
then; but the lesser ones were more than sufficient to overwhelm
him. Class-leaders were now reasoning with stricken sinners, and
Ezra, who could not take his eyes off the revivalist, heard the
footsteps of those who were going to the 'inquiry-room' for more
private counsel. In vain he argued that he was about to be
ridiculous; that the idea of him, Ezra Brunt, a professed Wesleyan
for half a century, being publicly 'saved' at the age of
fifty-seven was not to be entertained; that the town would talk;
that his business might suffer if for any reason he should be
morally bound to apply to it too strictly the principles of the New
Testament. He was under the spell. The tears coursed down his long
cheeks, and he forgot to care, but sat entranced by the
revivalist's marvellous voice. Suddenly, with an awful sob, he bent
and hid his face in his hands. The spectacle of the old, proud man
helpless in the grasp of 148 profound emotion was
a sight to rend the heart-strings.
'Brother, be of good cheer,' said a tremulous and benign voice
above him. 'The love of God compasseth all things. Only
believe.'
He looked up and saw the venerable face and long white beard of
George Christopher Timmis.
Ezra Brunt shrank away, embittered and ashamed.
'I cannot,' he murmured with difficulty.
'The love of God is all-powerful.'
'Will it make you part with that bit o' property, think you?'
said Ezra Brunt, with a kind of despairing ferocity.
'Brother,' replied the aged servant of God, unmoved, 'if my shop
is in truth a stumbling-block in this solemn hour, you shall have
it.'
Ezra Brunt was staggered.
'I believe! I believe!' he cried.
'Praise God!' said the chemist, with majestic joy.
Three months afterwards Eva Brunt and Clive Timmis were married.
It is characteristic of the fine sentimentality which underlies the
149
surface harshness of the inhabitants of the Five Towns that, though
No. 54 Machin Street was duly transferred to Ezra Brunt, the
chemist retiring from business, he has never rebuilt it to accord
with the rest of his premises. In all its shabbiness it stands
between the other big dazzling shops as a reminding monument.
I
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. 154
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 155 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.
II
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 Lawton was twenty-eight, an orphan, and a
schoolmistress. She, too, had 156 celibate rooms in
Park Terrace, and it was owing to this coincidence that Lionel had
made her acquaintance six months previously. She was not pretty,
but she was tall, straight, well dressed, well educated, and not
lacking in experience; and she had a little money of her own.
'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 157 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 158 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.
159 'My meditations point to Switzerland,' she
said. 'I have friends in Lausanne.'
The reference to foreign climes impressed him.
'Would that I could go to Switzerland too!' he exclaimed; and
privately: 'Now for it! I'm about to begin.'
'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 160 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 tête-à-tête,'
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.
III
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 Staffordshire
Signal in his accustomed solitude, that the boys were staying
later for cards, but 161 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 nunlike 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 162 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
163
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,
164
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 Lawton, and been accepted, just before she surprised them
together; and Lionel, with a man's excusable cowardice, 165 had
left his betrothed to announce the engagement.
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
me.—MAY.'
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 166 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.
IV
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 167 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 168 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 acute
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 169 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 170 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.
171 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 Lawton had
advantages, and striking advantages, but he could not be sure of
her. The suspicion that if she married him she would marry him for
her own ends caused him a secret disquiet, and he feared that one
day, perhaps one morning at breakfast, she might take it into her
intelligent head to mock him, to exercise upon him her gift of
irony, and to intimate to him that if he fancied she was his slave
he was deceived. That she sincerely admired him he never for an
instant doubted. But——
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?'
172 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, 173 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.
V
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 themselves 174 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.
175 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 176 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, 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?
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, 180 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 181 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 engine-men. His
engine never went wrong, his coal bills were never extravagant, and
(supreme 182 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 183 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?'
184 'Tiddy-fol-lol, grandfeyther,' the child
drawled in his silly, irritating voice, and added: 'They said I
darena say it to ye.'
Without and 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 Clowes Street, and
stopped before a row of small brown cottages. At the open door of
one of these cottages a woman sat sewing. 185 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 brokken.'
'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.
186 '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.
187 '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
188
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, moveless, 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
189
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.
190 '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 Providence
had intervened will never be shaken.
Miriam and Tommy now live in the villa-cottage with the old
people.
William Froyle, ostler at the Queen's Arms at Moorthorne, took
the letter, and, with a curt nod which stifled the loquacity of the
village postman, went at once from the yard into the coach-house.
He had recognised the hand-writing on the envelope, and the
recognition of it gave form and quick life to all the vague
suspicions that had troubled him some months before, and again
during the last few days. He felt suddenly the near approach of a
frightful calamity which had long been stealing towards him.
A wire-sheathed lantern, set on a rough oaken table, cast a
wavering light round the coach-house, and dimly showed the inner
stable. Within the latter could just be distinguished the
mottled-gray flanks of a fat cob which dragged its chain
occasionally, making 194 the large slow
movements of a horse comfortably lodged in its stall. The pleasant
odour of animals and hay filled the wide spaces of the shed, and
through the half-open door came a fresh thin mist rising from the
rain-soaked yard in the November evening.
Froyle sat down on the oaken table, his legs dangling, and
looked again at the envelope before opening it. He was a man about
thirty years of age, with a serious and thoughtful, rather heavy
countenance. He had a long light moustache, and his skin was a
fresh, rosy salmon colour; his straw-tinted hair was cut very
short, except over the forehead, where it grew full and bushy.
Dressed in his rough stable corduroys, his forearms bare and white,
he had all the appearance of the sturdy Englishman, the sort of
Englishman that crosses the world in order to find vent for his
taciturn energy on virgin soils. From the whole village he
commanded and received respect. He was known for a scholar, and it
was his scholarship which had obtained for him the proud position
of secretary to the provident society styled the Queen's Arms Slate
Club. His respectability and his learning combined 195 had
enabled him to win with dignity the hand of Susie Trimmer, the
grocer's daughter, to whom he had been engaged about a year. The
village could not make up its mind concerning that match; without
doubt it was a social victory for Froyle, but everyone wondered
that so sedate and sagacious a man should have seen in Susie a
suitable mate.
He tore open the envelope with his huge forefinger, and, bending
down towards the lantern, began to read the letter. It ran:
'OLDCASTLE STREET,
'BURSLEY.
'DEAR WILL,
'I asked father to tell you, but he would not. He said I must
write. Dear Will, I hope you will never see me again. As you will
see by the above address, I am now at Aunt Penrose's at Bursley.
She is awful angry, but I was obliged to leave the village because
of my shame. I have been a wicked girl. It was in July. You know
the man, because you asked me about him one Sunday night. He is no
good. He is a villain. Please forget all about me. I want to go to
London. So many people know me here, and 196 what with people
coming in from the village, too. Please forgive me.
'S. TRIMMER.'
After reading the letter a second time, Froyle folded it up and
put it in his pocket. Beyond a slight unaccustomed pallor of the
red cheeks, he showed no sign of emotion. Before the arrival of the
postman he had been cleaning his master's bicycle, which stood
against the table. To this he returned. Kneeling down in some fresh
straw, he used his dusters slowly and patiently—rubbing, then
stopping to examine the result, and then rubbing again. When the
machine was polished to his satisfaction, he wheeled it carefully
into the stable, where it occupied a stall next to that of the cob.
As he passed back again, the animal leisurely turned its head and
gazed at Froyle with its large liquid eyes. He slapped the immense
flank. Content, the animal returned to its feed, and the weighted
chain ran down with a rattle.
The fortnightly meeting of the Slate Club was to take place at
eight o'clock that evening. Froyle had employed part of the
afternoon in 197 making ready his books for the event, to him
always so solemn and ceremonious; and the affairs of the club were
now prominent in his mind. He was sorry that it would be impossible
for him to attend the meeting; fortunately, all the usual
preliminaries were complete.
He took a piece of notepaper from a little hanging cupboard,
and, sprawling across the table, began to write under the lantern.
The pencil seemed a tiny toy in his thick roughened fingers:
'To Mr. Andrew McCall, Chairman Queen's Arms Slate
Club.
'DEAR SIR,
'I regret to inform you that I shall not be at the meeting
to-night. You will find the books in order....'
Here he stopped, biting the end of the pencil in thought. He put
down the pencil and stepped hastily out of the stable, across the
yard, and into the hotel. In the large room, the room where
cyclists sometimes took tea and cold meat during the summer season,
the 198 long deal table and the double line of oaken
chairs stood ready for the meeting. A fire burnt warmly in the big
grate, and the hanging lamp had been lighted. On the wall was a
large card containing the rules of the club, which had been written
out in a fair hand by the schoolmaster. It was to this card that
Froyle went. Passing his thumb down the card, he paused at Rule
VII.:
'Each member shall, on the death of another member, pay 1s. for
benefit of widow or nominee of deceased, same to be paid within one
month after notice given.'
'Or nominee—nominee,' he murmured reflectively, staring at
the card. He mechanically noticed, what he had noticed often before
with disdain, that the chairman had signed the rules without the
use of capitals.
He went back to the dusk of the coach-house to finish his
letter, still murmuring the word 'nominee,' of whose meaning he was
not quite sure:
'I request that the money due to me from the Slate Club on my
death shall be paid to 199 my nominee, Miss
Susan Trimmer, now staying with her aunt, Mrs. Penrose, at
Bursley.
'Yours respectfully,
'WILLIAM FROYLE.'
After further consideration he added:
'P.S.—My annual salary of sixpence per member would be due
at the end of December. If so be the members would pay that, or
part of it, should they consider the same due, to Susan Trimmer as
well, I should be thankful.—Yours resp, W.F.'
He put the letter in an envelope, and, taking it to the large
room, laid it carefully at the end of the table opposite the
chairman's seat. Once more he returned to the coach-house. From the
hanging cupboard he now produced a piece of rope. Standing on the
table he could just reach, by leaning forward, a hook in the
ceiling, that was sometimes used for the slinging of bicycles. With
difficulty he made the rope fast to the hook. Putting a noose on
the other end, he tightened it round his neck. He looked up at the
ceiling and down at the floor in order to judge whether the rope
was short enough.
200 'Good-bye, Susan, and everyone,' he whispered,
and then stepped off the table.
The tense rope swung him by his neck halfway across the
coach-house. He swung twice to and fro, but as he passed under the
hook for the fifth time his toes touched the floor. The rope had
stretched. In another second he was standing firm on the floor,
purple and panting, but ignominiously alive.
'Good-even to you, Mr. Froyle. Be you committing suicide?' The
tones were drawling, uncertain, mildly astonished.
He turned round hastily, his hands busy with the rope, and saw
in the doorway the figure of Daft Jimmy, the Moorthorne idiot.
He hesitated before speaking, but he was not confused. No one
could have been confused before Daft Jimmy. Neither man nor woman
in the village considered his presence more than that of a cat.
'Yes, I am,' he said.
The middle-aged idiot regarded him with a vague, interested
smile, and came into the coach-house.
'You'n gotten the rope too long, Mr. Froyle. Let me help
you.'
201 Froyle calmly assented. He stood on the table,
and the two rearranged the noose and made it secure. As they did so
the idiot gossiped:
'I was going to Bursley to-night to buy me a pair o' boots, and
when I was at top o' th' hill I remembered as I'd forgotten the
measure o' my feet. So I ran back again for it. Then I saw the
light in here, and I stepped up to bid ye good-evening.'
Someone had told him the ancient story of the fool and his
boots, and, with the pride of an idiot in his idiocy, he had
determined that it should be related of himself.
Froyle was silent.
The idiot laughed with a dry cackle.
'Now you go,' said Froyle, when the rope was fixed.
'Let me see ye do it,' the idiot pleaded with pathetic eyes.
'No; out you get!'
Protesting, the idiot went forth, and his irregular clumsy
footsteps sounded on the pebble-paved yard. When the noise of them
ceased in the soft roadway, Froyle jumped off the table again.
Gradually his body, like a 202 stopping pendulum,
came to rest under the hook, and hung twitching, with strange
disconnected movements. The horse in the stable, hearing
unaccustomed noises, rattled his chain and stamped about in the
straw of his box.
Furtive steps came down the yard again, and Daft Jimmy peeped
into the coach-house.
'He done it! he done it!' the idiot cried gleefully. 'Damned if
he hasna'.' He slapped his leg and almost danced. The body still
twitched occasionally. 'He done it!'
'Done what, Daft Jimmy? You're making a fine noise there! Done
what?'
The idiot ran out of the stable. At the side-entrance to the
hotel stood the barmaid, the outline of her fine figure distinct
against the light from within.
The idiot continued to laugh.
'Done what?' the girl repeated, calling out across the dark yard
in clear, pleasant tones of amused inquiry. 'Done what?'
'What's that to you, Miss Tucker?'
'Now, none of your sauce, Daft Jimmy! Is Willie Froyle in
there?'
The idiot roared with laughter.
'Yes, he is, miss.'
203 'Well, tell him his master wants him. I don't
want to cross this mucky, messy yard.'
'Yes, miss.'
The girl closed the door.
The idiot went into the coach-house, and, slapping William's
body in a friendly way so that it trembled on the rope, he
spluttered out between his laughs:
'Master wants ye, Mr. Froyle.'
Then he walked out into the village street, and stood looking up
the muddy road, still laughing quietly. It was quite dark, but the
moon aloft in the clear sky showed the highway with its shining
ruts leading in a straight line over the hill to Bursley.
'Them shoes!' the idiot ejaculated suddenly. 'Well, I be an
idiot, and that's true! They can take the measure from my feet, and
I never thought on it till this minute!'
Laughing again, he set off at a run up the hill.
207
THE HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY
I
After a honeymoon of five weeks in the shining cities of the
Mediterranean and in Paris, they re-entered the British Empire by
the august portals of the Chatham and Dover Railway. They stood
impatiently waiting, part of a well-dressed, querulous crowd, while
a few officials performed their daily task of improvising a
Custom-house for registered luggage on a narrow platform of
Victoria Station. John, Mr. Norris's man, who had met them,
attended behind. Suddenly, with a characteristic movement, the
husband lifted his head, and then looked down at his wife.
'I say, May!'
'Well?'
She knew that he was about to propose some swift alteration of
their plans, but she smiled 208 upwards out of her
furs at his grave face, and the tone of her voice granted all
requests in advance.
'I think I'd better go to the office,' he said.
'Now?'
She smiled again, inviting him to do exactly what he chose. She
was already familiar with his restiveness under enforced delays and
inaction, and his unfortunate capacity for being actively bored by
trifles which did not interest him aroused in her a sort of
maternal sympathy.
'Yes,' he answered. 'I can be there and back in an hour or less.
You titivate yourself, and we'll dine at the Savoy, or anywhere you
please. We'll keep the ball rolling to-night. Yes,' he repeated, as
if to convince himself that he was not a deserter, 'I really must
call in at the office. You and John can see to the luggage, can't
you?'
'Of course,' she replied, with calm good-nature, and also with
perfect self-confidence. 'But give me the keys of the trunks, and
don't be late, Ted.'
'Oh, I shan't be late,' he said.
Their fingers touched as she took the keys.
209 He went away
enraptured anew by her delightful acquiescences, her unique smile,
her common-sense, her mature charm, and the astonishing elegance of
her person. The honeymoon was over—and with what finished
discretion, combining the innocent girl with the woman of the
world, she had lived through the honeymoon!—another life,
more delicious, was commencing.
'What a wife!' he thought triumphantly. 'She does understand a
man! And fancy leaving any ordinary bride to look after
luggage!'
Nevertheless, once in his offices at Winchester House, he
managed to forget her, and to forget time, for nearly an hour and a
half. When at last he came to himself from the enchantment of
affairs, he jumped into a hansom, and told the driver to drive fast
to Knightsbridge. He was ardent to see her again. In the dark
seclusion of the cab he speculated upon her toilette, the colour of
her shoes. He thought of the last five weeks, of the next five
years. Dwelling on their mutual love and esteem, their health,
their self-knowledge and experience and cheerfulness, her 210 sense
and grace, his talent for getting money first and keeping it
afterwards, he foresaw nothing but happiness for them. Children?
H'm! Possibly....
At Piccadilly Circus it began to rain—cold, heavy March
rain.
'Window down, sir?' asked the voice of the cabman.
'Yes,' he ordered sardonically. 'Better be suffocated than
drowned.'
'You're right, sir,' said the voice.
Soon, through the streaming glass, which made every gas-jet into
a shooting pillar of flame, Norris discerned vaguely the vast bulk
of Hyde Park Mansions. 'Good!' he muttered, and at that very moment
he was shot through the window into the thin, light-reflecting mire
of the street. Enormous and strange beasts menaced him with
pitiless hoofs. Millions of people crowded about him. In response
to a question that seemed to float slowly towards him, he tried to
give his address. He realized, by a considerable feat of intellect,
that the horse must have fallen down; and then, with a dim notion
that nothing mattered, he went to sleep.
211
II
In the boudoir of the magnificent flat on the first floor,
shielded from the noise and the inclemency of the world by four
silk-hung walls and a double window, and surrounded by all the
multitudinous and costly luxury that a stockbroker with brains and
taste can obtain for the wife of his love, May was leisurely
finishing her toilette. And every detail in the long, elaborate
process was accomplished with a passionate intention to bewitch the
man at Winchester House.
These two had first met seven years before, when May, the
daughter of a successful wholesale draper at Hanbridge, in the Five
Towns district of Staffordshire, was aged twenty-two. Mr. Scarratt
went to Manchester each Tuesday to buy, and about once a month he
took May with him. One day, when they were lunching at the Exchange
Restaurant, a young man came up whom her father introduced as Mr.
Edward Norris, his stockbroker. Mr. Norris, whose years were
thirty, glanced keenly at May, and accepted Mr. Scarratt's
invitation to join them. Ever afterwards May vividly remembered
212
the wonderful sensation, joyous yet disconcerting, which she then
experienced—the sensation of having captivated her father's
handsome and correct stockbroker. The three talked horses with a
certain freedom, and since May was accustomed to drive the Scarratt
dogcart, so famous in the Five Towns, she could bring her due share
to the conversation. The meal over, Mr. Norris discussed business
matters with his client, and then sedately departed, but not
without the obviously sincere expression of a desire to meet Miss
Scarratt again. The wholesale draper praised Edward's financial
qualities behind his back, and wondered that a man of such aptitude
should remain in Manchester while London existed. As for May, she
decided that she would have a new frock before she came to
Manchester in the following month.
She had a new frock, but not of the colour intended. By the
following month her father was enclosed in a coffin, and it
happened to his estate, as to the estates of many successful men
who employ stockbrokers, that the liabilities far more than covered
the assets. May and her mother were left without a penny. 213 The
mother did the right thing, and died—it was best. May went
direct to Brunt's, the largest draper in the Five Towns, and asked
for a place under 'Madame' in the dress-making department. Brunt's
daughter, who was about to be married, gave her the place
instantly. Three years later, when 'Madame' returned to Paris, May
stepped into the French-woman's shoes.
On Sundays and on Thursday afternoons, and sometimes (but not
too often) at the theatre, May was the finest walking advertisement
that Brunt's ever had. Old Brunt would have proposed to her, it was
rumoured, had he not been scared by her elegance. Sundry sons of
prosperous manufacturers, unabashed by this elegance, did in fact
secretly propose, but with what result was known only to
themselves.
Later, as May waxed in importance at Brunt's, she was sent to
Manchester to buy. She lunched at the Exchange Restaurant. The
world and Manchester are very small. The first man she set eyes on
was Edward Norris. Another week, Norris said to her with a thrill,
and he would have been gone for ever to 214 London. Chance is
not to be flouted. The sequel was inevitable. They loved. And all
the select private bars in Hanbridge tinkled to the news that May
Scarratt had been and hooked a stockbroker!
When the toilette was done, and the maid gone, she wound a thin
black scarf round her olive neck and shoulders, and sat down
negligently on a Chippendale settee in the attitude of a portrait
by Boldini; her little feet were tucked up sideways on the settee;
the perforated lace ends of the scarf fell over her low corsage to
the level of the seat. And she waited, still the bride. He was
late, but she knew he would be late. Sure in the conviction that he
was a strong man, a man of imagination and of deeds, she could
easily excuse this failing in him, as she did that other habit of
impulsive action in trifles. Nay, more, she found keen pleasure in
excusing it. 'Dear thing!' she reflected, 'he forgets so.'
Therefore she waited, content in enjoying the image in the glass of
her dark face, her small plump person, and her Paris
gown—that dream! She thought with assuaged grief of her
father's tragedy; she would have liked him to see her 215 now,
the jewel in the case—her father and she had understood each
other.
All around, and above and below, she felt, without hearing it,
the activity of the opulent, complex life of the mansions. Her mind
dwelt with satisfaction on long carpeted corridors noiselessly
paraded by flunkeys, mahogany lifts continually ascending and
descending like the angels of the ladder, the great entrance hall
with its fire always burning and its doors always swinging, the
salle à manger sown with rose-shaded candles, and all
the splendid privacies rising stage upon stage to the attics, where
the flunkeys philosophized together. She confessed the beauty and
distinction achieved by this extravagant organization for
gratifying earthly desires. Often, in the pinching days of her
servitude, she had murmured against the injustice of things, and
had called wealth a crime while poverty starved. But now she
perceived that society was what it was inevitably, and could not be
altered. She accepted it in profound peace of mind, gaily fraternal
towards the fortunate, compassionate towards those in
adversity.
In the next flat someone began to play very
216 brilliantly a
Hungarian Rhapsody of Liszt's. And even the faint sound of that
riotous torrent of melody, so arrogantly gorgeous, intoxicated her
soul. She shivered under the sudden vision of the splendid joy of
being alive. And how she envied the player! French she had learned
from 'Madame,' but she had no skill on the piano; it was her one
regret.
She touched the bell.
'Has your master come in yet?' she inquired of the maid.
'No, madam, not yet.'
She knew he had not come in, but she could not resist the
impulse to ask.
Ten minutes later, when the piano had ceased, she jumped up,
and, creeping to the front-door of the flat, gazed foolishly across
the corridor at the grille of the lift. She heard the lift in
travail. It appeared and passed out of sight above. No, he had not
come! Glancing aside, she saw the tall slender figure of a girl in
a green tea-gown—a mere girl: it was the player of the
Hungarian Rhapsody. And this girl, too, she thought, was expectant
and disappointed! They shut their doors simultaneously, she and
May, who also had her 217 girlish moments.
Then the rhapsody recommenced.
'Oh, madam!' screamed the maid, almost tumbling into the
boudoir.
'What is it?' May demanded with false calm.
The maid lifted the corner of her black apron to her eyes, as
though she had been a stage soubrette in trouble.
'The master, madam! He's fell out of his cab—just in front
of the mansions—and they're bringing him in—such blood
I never did see!'
The maid finished with hysterics.
III
'And them just off their honeymoon!'
The inconsolable tones of the lady's-maid came from the kitchen
to the open door of the bedroom, where May was giving instructions
to the elderly cook.
'Send that girl out of the flat this moment!' May said.
'Yes, ma'am.'
'Make the beef-tea in case it's wanted, and
218 let me have some
more warm water. There's John and the doctor!'
She started at a knock.
'No, it's only the postman, ma'am.'
Some letters danced on the hall floor and on her nerves.
'Oh dear!' May whispered. 'I thought it was the doctor at
last.'
'John's bound to be back with one in a minute, ma'am. Do bear
up,' urged the cook, hurrying to the kitchen.
She could have destroyed the woman for those last words.
With the proud certainty of being equal to the dreadful crisis,
she turned abruptly into the bedroom, where her husband lay
insensible on one of the new beds. Assisted by the policemen and
the cook, she had done everything that could be done: cut away the
coats and the waistcoat, removed the boots, straightened the limbs,
washed the face and neck—especially the neck—which had
to be sponged continually, and scattered messengers, including
John, over the vicinity in search of medical aid. And now the
policemen had gone, the general emotion on the staircase had
subsided, 219 the front-door of the flat was shut. The great
ocean of the life of the mansions had closed smoothly upon her
little episode. She was alone with the shattered organism.
She bent fondly over the bed, and her Paris frock, and the black
scarf which she had not removed, touched its ruinous burden. Her
right hand directed the sponge with ineffable tenderness, and then
the long thin fingers tightened to a frenzied clutch to squeeze it
over the basin. The whole of her being was absorbed in a deep
passion of pity and an intolerable hunger for the doctor.
Through the wall came once more the faint sound of the Hungarian
Rhapsody, astonishingly rapid and brilliant. She set her teeth to
endure its unconscious message of the vast indifference of life to
death.
The organism stirred, and May watched the deathly face for a
sign. The eyes opened and stared at her in agonized bewilderment.
The lips tried to speak, and failed.
'It's all right, darling,' she said softly. 'You're in your own
bed. The doctor will be here directly. Drink this.'
She gave him some brandy-and-water, and 220 they looked at each
other. He was no longer Edward Norris, the finely regulated
intelligence, the masterful volition, the conqueror of the world
and of a woman; but merely the embodiment of a frightened,
despairing, flickering, hysterical will-to-live, which glanced in
terror at the corners of the room as though it saw fate there. And
beneath her intense solicitude was the instinctive feeling, which
hurt her, but which she could not dismiss, of her measureless,
dominating superiority. With what glad relief would she have
changed places with him!
'I'm dying, May,' he murmured at length, with a sigh. 'Why
doesn't the doctor come?'
'He is coming,' she replied soothingly. 'You'll be better
soon.'
But his effort in speaking obliged her to use the sponge again,
and he saw it, and drew another sigh, more mortal than the
first.
'Oh! I'm dying,' he repeated.
'Not you, Ted!' And her smile cost her an awful pang.
'I am. I know it.' This time he spoke with sad resignation. 'You
must face it. And—listen.'
221 'What, dear?'
A physical sensation of sickness came over her. She could not
disguise from herself the fact that he was dying. The warped and
pallid face, the panic-struck eyes, the sweat, the wound in the
neck, the damp hands nervously pulling the hem of the
sheet—these indications were not to be gainsaid. The truth
was too horrible to grasp; she wanted to put it away from her.
'This calamity cannot happen to me!' she thought urgently, and all
the while she knew that it was happening to her.
He collected the feeble remnant of his powers by an immense
effort, and began to speak, slowly and fragmentarily, and with such
weakness that she could only catch his words by putting her ear to
his mouth. The restless hands dropped the sheet and took the end of
the black scarf.
'You'll be comfortable—for money,' he said. 'Will made....
It's not that. It's ... I must tell you. It's——'
'Yes?' she encouraged him. 'Tell me. I can hear.'
'It's about your father. I didn't treat him
222 quite right ...
once.... Week after I first met you, May.... No, not quite right.
He was holding Hull and Barnsley shares ... you know, railway ...
great gambling stock, then, Hull and Barn—Barnsley. Holding
them on cover; for the rise.... They dropped too much—dropped
to 23.... He couldn't hold any longer ... wired to me to sell and
cut the loss. Understand?'
'Yes,' she said, trembling. 'I quite understand.'
'Well ... I wired back, "Sold at 23." ... But some mistake.
Shares not sold. Clerk's mistake.... Clerk didn't sell.... Next day
rise began.... I didn't wire him shares not sold. Somehow, I
couldn't.... Put it off.... Rise went on.... I took over shares
myself ... you see—myself.... Made nearly five thousand
clear.... I wanted money then.... I think I would have told him,
perhaps, later ... made it right ... but he died ... sudden ... I
wasn't going to let his creditors have that five thou.... No, he'd
meant to sell ... and, look here, May, if those shares had dropped
lower ... 'stead of rising ... I should have had
223 to stand the
racket ... with your father, for my clerk's mistake.... See?...
He'd meant to sell.... Hard lines on him, but he'd meant to
sell.... He'd meant——'
'Don't say any more, dear.'
'Must explain this, May. Why didn't I give the money to you ...
when he was dead?... Because I knew you'd only ... give it ... to
creditors.... I knew you.... That's straight.... I've told you
now.'
He lost consciousness again, but for an instant May did not
notice it. She was crying, and her tears fell on his face.
Then came a doctor, a little dark man, who explained with calm
politeness that he had been out when the messenger first arrived.
He took off his coat, hung it up, opened his bag, and proceeded to
a minute examination of the patient. His movements were so
methodical, and he gave orders to May in a tone so quiet, casual,
and ordinary, that she almost lost her sense of the reality of the
scene.
'Yes, yes,' he said, from time to time, as if to himself;
nothing else; not a single enlightening word to May.
224 'I'm dying,' moaned Edward, opening his
eyes.
The doctor glanced round at May and winked. That wink,
deliberate and humorous, was like an electric shock to her. She
could actually feel her heart leap in her breast. If she had not
been afraid of the doctor, she would have fainted.
'You all think you're dying,' the doctor remarked in a low,
amused tone to the ceiling, as he wiped a pair of scissors, 'when
you've been knocked silly, especially if there's a lot of blood
about.'
The door opened.
'Here's John, ma'am,' said the cook, 'with two more doctors.
What am I to do?'
May involuntarily turned towards the door.
'Don't you go, Mrs. Norris,' the little dark man commanded. 'I
want you.' Then he carelessly scrutinized the elderly servant.
'Tell 'em they're too late,' he said. 'It's generally like that
when there's an accident,' he continued after the housekeeper had
gone. 'First you can't get a doctor anywhere, and then in half an
hour or so we come in crowds. I've known seven doctors turn up one
after another. 225 But in that affair the man happened to have
been killed outright.'
He smiled grimly. In a little while he was snapping his bag.
'I'll come in the morning, of course,' he said, as he wrote on a
piece of paper. 'Have this made up, and give it him in the night if
he is wakeful. Keep him warm. You might put a couple of hot-water
bags, one on either side of him. You've got beef-tea made, you say?
That's right. Let him have as much as he wants. Mr. Norris, you'll
sleep like a top.'
'But, doctor,' May inquired the next morning in the hall, after
Edward had smiled at a joke, and been informed that he must run
down to Bournemouth in a week, 'have we nothing to fear?'
'I think not,' was the measured answer. 'These affairs nearly
always seem much worse than they are. Of course, the immediate
upset is tremendous—the disorganization, and all that sort of
thing. But Nature's pretty wonderful. You'll find your husband will
soon get over it. I should say he had a good constitution.'
'And there will be no permanent effects?'
'Yes,' said the doctor, with genial cynicism.
226 'There'll be one
permanent effect. Nobody will ever persuade him to ride in a hansom
again. If he can't find a four-wheeler, he'll walk in future.'
She returned to the bedroom. The man on the bed was Edward
Norris once more, in control of himself, risen out of his
humiliation. A feeling of thankfulness overwhelmed her for a
moment, and she sat down.
'Well, May?' he murmured.
'Well, dear.'
They both realized that what they had been through was a common,
daily street accident. The smile of each was self-conscious,
apprehensive, insincere.
'Quite a concert going on next door,' he said with an
affectation of lightness.
It was the Hungarian Rhapsody, impetuous and brilliant as ever.
How she hated it now—this symbol of the hurried, unheeding,
relentless, hollow gaiety of the world! Yet she longed for the
magic fingers of the player, that she, too, might smother grief in
such glittering veils!
227
IV
The marriage which had begun so dramatically fell into placid
routine. Edward fulfilled the prophecy of the doctor. In a week
they were able to go to Bournemouth for a few days, and in less
than a fortnight he was at the office—the strong man again,
confident and ambitious.
After days devoted to finance, he came home in the evenings
high-spirited and determined to enjoy himself. His voice was firm
and his eye steady when he spoke to his wife; there was no trace of
self-consciousness in his demeanour. She admired the masculinity of
the brain that could forget by an effort of will. She felt that he
trusted her to forget also; that he relied on her common-sense, her
characteristic sagacity, to extinguish for ever the memory of an
awkward incident. He loved her. He was intensely proud of her. He
treated her with every sort of generosity. And in return he
expected her to behave like a man.
She loved him. She esteemed him as a wife should. She made a
profession of wifehood. 228 He gave his days to
finance and his nights to diversion; but her vocation was always
with her—she was never off duty. She aimed to please him to
the uttermost in everything, to be in all respects the ideal
helpmate of a husband who was at once strenuous, fastidious, and
wealthy. Elegance and suavity were a religion with her. She was the
delight of the eye and of the ear, the soother of groans, the
refuge of distress, the uplifter of the heart.
She made new acquaintances for him, and cemented old
friendships. Her manner towards his old friends enchanted him; but
when they were gone she had a way of making him feel that she was
only his. She thought that she was succeeding in her aim. She
thought that all these sweet, endless labours—of traffic with
dressmakers, milliners, coiffeurs, maids, cooks, and furnishers; of
paying and receiving calls; of delicious surprise journeys to the
City to bring home the breadwinner; of giving and accepting
dinners; of sitting alert and appreciative in theatres and
music-halls; of supping in golden restaurants; of being serious,
cautionary, submissive, and seductive; of smiles, laughter,
229
and kisses; and of continuous sympathetic responsiveness—she
thought that all these labours had attained their object: Edward's
complete serenity and satisfaction. She imagined that love and duty
had combined successfully to deceive him on one solitary point. She
was sure that he was deceived. But she was wrong.
One evening they were at the theatre alone together. It was a
musical comedy, and they had a large stage-box. May sat a little
behind. After having been darkened for a scenic conjuring trick,
the stage was very suddenly thrown into brilliant light. Edward
turned with equal suddenness to share his appreciation of the
effect with his wife, and the light and his eye caught her
unawares. She smiled instantly, but too late; he had seen the
expression of her features. For a second she felt as if the whole
fabric which she had been building for the last six months had
crumbled; but this disturbing idea passed as she recovered
herself.
'Let's go home, eh?' he said, at the end of the first act.
'Yes,' she agreed. 'It would be nice to be in early, wouldn't
it?'
230 In the brougham they exchanged the amiable
banalities of people who are thoroughly intimate. When they reached
the flat, she poured out his whisky-and-potass, and sat on the arm
of his particular arm-chair while he sipped it; then she whispered
that she was going to bed.
'Wait a bit,' he said; 'I want to talk to you seriously.'
'Dear thing!' she murmured, stroking his coat.
She had not the slightest notion of his purpose.
'You've tried your best, May,' he said bluntly, 'but you've
failed. I've suspected it for a long time.'
She flushed, and retired to a sofa, away from the orange
electric lamp.
'What do you mean, Edward?' she asked.
'You know very well what I mean, my dear,' he replied. 'What I
told you—that night! You've tried to forget it. You've tried
to look at me as though you had forgotten it. But you can't do it.
It's on your mind. I've noticed it again and again. I noticed it at
the theatre to-night. So I said 231 to myself, "I'll
have it out with her." And I'm having it out.'
'My dear Ted, I assure you——'
'No, you don't,' he stopped her. 'I wish you did. Now you must
just listen. I know exactly what sort of an idiot I was that night
as well as you do. But I couldn't help it. I was a fool to tell
you. Still, I thought I was dying. I simply had a babbling fit.
People are like that. You thought I was dying, too, didn't
you?'
'Yes,' she said quietly, 'for a minute or two.'
'Ah! It was that minute or two that did it. Well, I let it out,
the rotten little secret. I admit it wasn't on the square, that bit
of business. But, on the other hand, it wasn't anything really
bad—like cruelty to animals or ruining a girl. Of course, the
chap was your father, but, but——. Look here, May, you
ought to be able to see that I was exactly the same man after I
told you as I was before. You ought to be able to see that. My
character wasn't wrecked because I happened to split on myself,
like an ass, about that affair. Mind you, I don't blame you. You
can't help your feelings. But do you suppose there's a single
232
man on this blessed earth without a secret? I'm not going to grovel
before gods or men. I'm not going to pretend I'm so frightfully
sorry. I'm sorry in a way. But can't you see——'
'Don't say any more, Ted,' she begged him, fingering her sash.
'I know all that. I know it all, and everything else you can say.
Oh, my darling boy! do you think I would look down on you ever so
little because of—what you told me? Who am I? I wouldn't care
twopence even if——'
'But it's between us all the same,' he broke in. 'You can't get
over it.'
'Get over it!' she repeated lamely.
'Can you? Have you?' He pinned her to a direct answer.
She did not flinch.
'No,' she said.
'I thought you would have done,' he remarked, half to himself.
'I thought you would. I thought you were enough a woman of the
world for that, May. It isn't as if the confounded thing had made
any real difference to your father. The old man died,
and——'
233 'Ted!' she exclaimed, 'I shall have to tell
you, after all. It killed him.'
'What killed him? He died of gastritis.'
'He was ill with gastritis, but he died of suicide. It's easy
for a gastritis patient to commit suicide. And father did.'
'Why?'
'Oh, ruin, despair! He'd been in difficulties for a long time.
He said that selling those shares just one day too soon was the end
of it. When he saw them going up day after day, it got on his mind.
He said he knew he would never, never have any luck. And then
...'
'You kept it quiet.' He was walking about the room.
'Yes, that was pretty easy.'
'And did your mother know?'
He turned and looked at her.
'Yes, mother knew. It finished her. Oh, Ted!' she burst out, 'if
you'd only telegraphed to him the next morning that the shares
weren't sold, things might have been quite different.'
'You mean I killed your father—and your mother.'
234 'No, I don't,' she cried passionately. 'I tell
you I don't. You didn't know. But I think of it all, sometimes. And
that's why—that's why——'
She sat down again.
'By God, May,' he swore, 'I'm frightfully sorry!'
'I never meant to tell you,' she said, composing herself. 'But,
there! things slip out. Good-night.'
She was gone, but in passing him she had timidly caressed his
shoulder.
'It's all up,' he said to himself. 'This will always be between
us. No one could expect her to forget it.'
V
Gradually her characteristic habits deserted her; she seemed to
lose energy and a part of her interest in those things which had
occupied her most. She changed her dress less frequently, ignoring
dressmakers, and she showed no longer the ravishing elegance of the
bride. She often lay in bed till noon, she who had always entered
the dining-room at 235 nine o'clock precisely to dispense his coffee
and listen to his remarks on the contents of the newspaper. She
said 'As you please' to the cook, and the meals began to lose their
piquancy. She paid no calls, but some of her women friends
continued, nevertheless, to visit her. Lastly, she took to sewing.
The little dark doctor, who had become an acquaintance, smiled at
her and told her to do no more than she felt disposed to do. She
reclined on sofas in shaded rooms, and appeared to meditate. She
was not depressed, but thoughtful. It was as though she had much to
settle in her own mind. At intervals the faint sound of the
Hungarian Rhapsody mingled with her reveries.
As for Edward, his behaviour was immaculate. During the day he
made money furiously. In the evening he sat with his wife. They did
not talk much, and he never questioned her. She developed a certain
curious whimsicality now and then; but for him she could do no
wrong.
The past was not mentioned. They both looked apprehensively
towards the future, towards a crisis which they knew was inexorably
236
approaching. They were afraid, while pretending to have no
fear.
And one afternoon, precipitately, surprisingly, the crisis
came.
'You are the father of a son—a very noisy son,' said the
doctor, coming into the drawing-room where Edward had sat in
torture for three hours.
'And May?'
'Oh, never fear: she's doing excellently.'
'Can I go and see her?' he asked, like a humble petitioner.
'Well—yes,' said the doctor, 'for one minute; not
more.'
So he went into the bedroom as into a church, feeling a fool.
The nurse, miraculously white and starched, stood like a sentinel
at the foot of the bed of mystery.
'All serene, May?' he questioned. If he had attempted to say
another word he would have cried.
The pale mother nodded with a fatigued smile, and by a scarcely
perceptible gesture drew his attention to a bundle. From the next
flat came a faint, familiar sound, insolently joyous.
237 'Yes,' he thought, 'but if they had both been
lying dead here that tune would have been the same.'
Two months later he left the office early, telling his secretary
that he had a headache. It was a mere fibbing excuse. He suffered
from sudden fits of anxiety about his wife and child. When he
reached the flat, he found no one at home but the cook.
'Where's your mistress?' he demanded.
'She's out in the park with baby and nurse, sir.'
'But it's going to rain,' he cried angrily. 'It is raining.
They'll get wet through.'
He rushed into the corridor, and met the procession—May,
the perambulator, and the nursemaid.
'Only fancy, Ted!' May exclaimed, 'the perambulator will go into
the lift, after all. Aren't you glad?'
'Yes,' he said. 'But you're wet, surely?'
'Not a drop. We just got in in time.'
'Sure?'
'Quite.'
The tableau of May, elegant as ever, but her eyes brighter and
her body more leniently 238 curved, of the
hooded perambulator, and of the fluffy-white nursemaid
behind—it was too much for him. Touching clumsily the apron
of the perambulator, the stockbroker turned into his doorway. Just
then the girl from the next flat came out into the corridor,
dressed for social rites of the afternoon. The perambulator was her
excuse for stopping.
'What a pretty boy!' she exclaimed in ecstasy, trying to squeeze
her picture hat under the hood of the perambulator.
'Do you really think so?' said the mother, enchanted.
'Of course! The darling! How I envy you!'
May wanted to reciprocate this politeness.
'I can't tell you,' she said, 'how I envy you your
piano-playing. There's one piece——'
'Envy me! Why! It's only a pianola we've got!'
'Isn't he the picture of his granddad?' said May to Edward when
they bent over the cot that night before retiring.
And as she said it there was such candour in her voice, such
content in her smiling and 239 courageous eyes,
that Edward could not fail to comprehend her message to him. Down
in some very secret part of his soul he felt for the first time the
real force of the great explanatory truth that one generation
succeeds another.
The manuscript ran thus:
When I had finished my daily personal examination of the ropes
and trapezes, I hesitated a moment, and then climbed up again, to
the roof, where the red and the blue long ropes were fastened. I
took my sharp scissors from my chatelaine, and gently fretted the
blue rope with one blade of the scissors until only a single strand
was left intact. I gazed down at the vast floor a hundred feet
below. The afternoon varieties were over, and a phrenologist was
talking to a small crowd of gapers in a corner. The rest of the
floor was pretty empty save for the chairs and the fancy stalls,
and the fatigued stall-girls in their black dresses. I too, had
once almost been a stall-girl at the Aquarium! I descended. Few
observed me 244 in my severe street dress. Our secretary,
Charles, attended me on the stage.
'Everything right, Miss Paquita?' he said, handing me my hat and
gloves, which I had given him, to hold.
I nodded. I could see that he thought I was in one of my stern,
far-away moods.
'Miss Mariquita is waiting for you in the carriage,' he
said.
We drove away in silence—I with my inborn melancholy too
sad, Sally (Mariquita) too happy to speak. This daily afternoon
drive was really part of our 'turn'! A team of four mules driven by
a negro will make a sensation even in Regent Street. All London
looked at us, and contrasted our impassive beauty—mine mature
(too mature!) and dark, Sally's so blonde and youthful, our simple
costumes, and the fact that we stayed at an exclusive Mayfair
hotel, with the stupendous flourish of our turnout. The renowned
Sisters Qita—Paquita and Mariquita Qita—and the
renowned mules of the Sisters Qita! Two hundred pounds a week at
the Aquarium! Twenty-five thousand francs for one month at the
Casino de Paris! Twelve thousand five hundred dollars for a tour of
fifty 245 performances in the States! Fifteen hundred
pesos a night and a special train de luxe in Argentina and
Brazil! I could see the loungers and the drivers talking and
pointing as usual. The gilded loungers in Verrey's café got
up and watched us through the windows as we passed. This was fame.
For nearly twenty years I had been intimate with fame, and with the
envy of women and the foolish homage of men.
We saw dozens of omnibuses bearing the legend 'Qita.' Then we
met one which said: 'Empire Theatre. Valdès, the matchless
juggler,' and Sally smiled with pleasure.
'He's coming to see our turn to-night, after his,' she remarked,
blushing.
'Valdès? Why?' I asked, without turning my head.
'He wants us to sup with him, to celebrate our engagement.'
'When do you mean to get married?' I asked her shortly. I felt
quite calm.
'I guess you're a Tartar to-day,' said the pretty thing, with a
touch of her American sauciness. 'We haven't studied it out yet. It
was only yesterday afternoon he kissed me for the first time.' Then
she bent towards me 246 with her characteristic plaintive, wistful
appeal. 'Say! You aren't vexed, Selina, are you, because of this?
Of course, he wants me to tour with him after we're married, and do
a double act. He's got lots of dandy ideas for a double act. But I
won't, I won't, Selina, unless you say the word. Now, don't you go
and be cross, Selina.'
I let myself expand generously.
'My darling girl!' I said, glancing at her kindly. 'You ought to
know me better. Of course I'm not cross. And of course you must
tour with Valdès. I shall be all right. How do you suppose I
managed before I invented you?' I smiled like an indulgent
mother.
'Oh! I didn't mean that,' she said. 'I know you're frightfully
clever. I'm nothing——'
'I hope you'll be awfully happy,' I whispered, squeezing her
hand. 'And don't forget that I introduced him to you—I knew
him years before you did. I'm the cause of this
bliss——Do you remember that cold morning in
Berlin?'
'Oh! well, I should say!' she exclaimed in ecstasy.
When we reached our rooms in the hotel I 247 kissed her warmly.
Women do that sort of thing.
Then a card was brought to me. 'George Capey,' it said; and in
pencil, 'Of the Five Towns.'
I shrugged my shoulders. Sally had gone to scribble a note to
her Valdès. 'Show Mr. Capey in,' I said, and a natty young
man entered, half nervousness, half audacity.
'How did you know I come from the Five Towns?' I questioned
him.
'I am on the Evening Mail,' he said, 'where they know
everything, madam.'
I was annoyed. 'Then they know, on the Evening Mail that
Paquita Qita has never been interviewed, and never will be,' I
said.
'Besides,' he went on, 'I come from the Five Towns myself.'
'Bursley?' I asked mechanically.
'Bursley,' he ejaculated; then added, 'you haven't been near old
Bosley since——'
It was true.
'No,' I said hastily. 'It is many years since I have been in
England, even. Do they know down there who Qita is?'
'Not they!' he replied.
248 I grew reflective. Stars such as I have no
place of origin. We shoot up out of a void, and sink back into a
void. I had forgotten Bursley and Bursley folk. Recollections
rushed in upon me.... I felt beautifully sad. I drew off my gloves,
and flung my hat on a chair with a movement that would have
bewitched a man of the world, but Mr. George Capey was unimpressed.
I laughed.
'What's the joke?' he inquired. I adored him for his
Bursliness.
'I was just thinking, of fat Mrs. Cartledge, who used to keep
that fishmonger's shop in Oldcastle Street, opposite Bates's. I
wonder if she's still there?'
'She is,' he said. 'And fatter than ever! She's getting on in
years now.'
I broke the rule of a lifetime, and let him interview me.
'Tell them I'm thirty-seven,' I said. 'Yes, I mean it. Tell
them.'
And then for another tit-bit I explained to him how I had
discovered Sally at Koster and Bial's, in New York, five years ago,
and made her my sister for stage purposes because I was lonely, and
liked her American simplicity and 249 twang. He departed
full of tea and satisfaction.
It was our last night at the Aquarium. The place was crammed.
The houses where I performed were always crammed. Our turn was in
three parts, and lasted half an hour. The first part was a skirt
dance in full afternoon dress (danse de modernité, I
called it); the second was a double horizontal bar act; the third
was the famous act of the red and the blue ropes, in full evening
dress. It was 10.45 when we climbed the silk ladders for the third
part. High up in the roof, separated from each other by nearly the
length of the great hall, Sally and I stood on two little
platforms. I held the ends of the red and the blue ropes. I had to
let the blue rope swing across the hall to her. She would seize it,
and, clutching it, swoop like the ball of an enormous pendulum from
her platform to mine. (But would she?) I should then swing on the
red rope to the platform she had left.
Then the band would stop for the thrilling moment, and the
lights would be lowered. Each lighting and holding a powerful
electric 250 hand-light—one red, one blue—we
should signal the drummer and plunge simultaneously into space,
flash past each other in mid-flight, exchanging lights as we passed
(this was the trick), and soar to opposite platforms again, amid
frenzied applause. There were no nets.
That was what ought to occur.
I stood bowing to the floor of tiny upturned heads, and jerking
the ropes a little. Then I let Sally's rope go with a push, and it
dropped away from me, and in a few seconds she had it safe in her
strong hand. She was taller than me, with a fuller figure, yet she
looked quite small on her distant platform. All the evening I had
been thinking of fat old Mrs. Cartledge messing and slopping among
cod and halibut on white tiles. I could not get Bursley and my
silly infancy out of my head. I followed my feverish career from
the age of fifteen, when that strange Something in me, which makes
an artist, had first driven me forth to conquer two continents. I
thought of all the golden loves I had scorned, and my own love,
which had been ignored, unnoticed, but which still obstinately
burned. I glanced downwards and descried Valdès precisely
where Sally had 251 said he would be. Valdès, what a fool
you were! And I hated a fool. I am one of those who can love and
hate, who can love and despise, who can love and loathe the same
object in the same moment. Then I signalled to Sally to plunge, and
my eyes filled with tears. For, you see, somehow, in some senseless
sentimental way, the thought of fat Mrs. Cartledge and my silly
infancy had forced me to send Sally the red rope, not the blue one.
We exchanged ropes on alternate nights, but this was her night for
the blue one.
She swung over, alighting accurately at my side with that
exquisite outward curve of the spine which had originally attracted
me to her.
'You sent me the red one,' she said to me, after she had
acknowledged the applause.
'Yes,' I said. 'Never mind; stick to it now you've got it.
Here's the red light. Have you seen Valdès?'
She nodded.
I took the blue light and clutched the blue rope. Instead of
murder—suicide, since it must be one or the other. And why
not? Indeed, I censured myself in that second for having 252 meant
to kill Sally. Not because I was ashamed of the sin, but because
the revenge would have been so pitiful and weak. If Valdès
the matchless was capable of passing me over and kneeling to the
pretty thing——
I stood ready. The world was to lose that fineness, that
distinction, that originality, that disturbing subtlety, which
constituted Paquita Qita. I plunged.
... I was on the other platform. The rope had held, then: I
remembered nothing of the flight except that I had passed near the
upturned, pleasant face of Valdès.
The band stopped. The lights of the hall were lowered. All was
dark. I switched on my dazzling blue light; Sally switched on her
red one. I stood ready. The rope could not possibly endure a second
strain. I waved to Sally and signalled to the conductor. The world
was to lose Paquita. The drum began its formidable roll. Whirrr! I
plunged, and saw the red star rushing towards me. I snatched it and
soared upwards. The blue rope seemed to tremble. As I came near the
platform at decreasing speed, it seemed to stretch like elastic. It
broke! The platform 253 jumped up suddenly over my head, but I caught
at the silk ladder. I was saved! There was a fearful silence, and
then the appalling shock of hysterical applause from seven thousand
throats. I slid down the ladder, ran across the stage into my
dressing-room for a cloak, out again into the street. In two days I
was in Buda-Pesth.
257
NOCTURNE AT THE MAJESTIC
I
In the daily strenuous life of a great hotel there are periods
during which its bewildering activities slacken, and the vast
organism seems to be under the influence of an opiate. Such a
period recurs after dinner when the guests are preoccupied by the
mysterious processes of digestion in the drawing-rooms or
smoking-rooms or in the stalls of a theatre. On the evening of this
nocturne the well-known circular entrance-hall of the Majestic,
with its tessellated pavement, its malachite pillars, its Persian
rugs, its lounges, and its renowned stuffed bears at the foot of
the grand stairway, was for the moment deserted, save by the head
hall-porter and the head night-porter and the girl in the bureau.
It was a quarter to nine, and the head hall-porter was abdicating
his 258 pagoda to the head night-porter, and telling
him the necessary secrets of the day. These two lords, before whom
the motley panorama of human existence was continually being
enrolled, held a portentous confabulation night and morning. They
had no illusions; they knew life. Shakespeare himself might have
listened to them with advantage.
The girl in the bureau, like a beautiful and languishing animal
in its cage, leaned against her window, and looked between two
pillars at the magnificent lords. She was too far off to catch
their talk, and, indeed, she watched them absently in a reverie
induced by the sweet melancholy of the summer twilight, by the
torpidity of the hour, and by the prospect of the next day, which
was her day off. The liveried functionaries ignored her, probably
scorned her as a mere pretty little morsel. Nevertheless, she was
the centre of energy, not they. If money were payable, she was the
person to receive it; if a customer wanted a room, she would choose
it; and the lords had to call her 'miss.' The immense and splendid
hotel pulsed round this simple heart hidden under a white blouse.
Especially in summer, 259 her presence and the
presence of her companions in the bureau (but to-night she was
alone) ministered to the satisfaction of male guests, whose cruel
but profoundly human instincts found pleasure in the fact that, no
matter when they came in from their wanderings, the pretty captives
were always there in the bureau, smiling welcome, puzzling stupid
little brains and puckering pale brows over enormous ledgers,
twittering borrowed facetiousness from rosy mouths, and smoothing
out seductive toilettes with long thin hands that were made for
ring and bracelet and rudder-lines, and not a bit for the pen and
the ruler.
The pretty little thing despised of the functionaries
corresponded almost exactly in appearance to the typical bureau
girl. She was moderately tall; she had a good slim figure, all
pleasant curves, flaxen hair and plenty of it, and a dainty, rather
expressionless face; the ears and mouth were very small, the eyes
large and blue, the nose so-so, the cheeks and forehead of an equal
ivory pallor, the chin trifling, with a crease under the lower lip
and a rich convexity springing out from below the crease. The
extremities of the full lips were 260 nearly always drawn
up in a smile, mechanical, but infallibly attractive. The hair was
of an orthodox frizziness. You would have said she was a nice,
kind, good-natured girl, flirtatious but correct, well adapted to
adorn a dogcart on Sundays.
This was Nina, foolish Nina, aged twenty-one. In her reverie the
entire Hôtel Majestic weighed on her; she had a more than
adequate sense of her own solitary importance in the bureau, and
stirring obscurely beneath that consciousness were the deep
ineradicable longings of a poor pretty girl for heaps of money,
endless luxury of finery and chocolates, and sentimental silken
dalliance.
Suddenly a stranger entered the hall. His advent seemed to wake
the place out of the trance into which it had fallen. The nocturne
had begun. Nina straightened herself and intensified her eternal
smile. The two porters became military, and smiled with a special
and peculiar urbanity. Several lesser but still lordly
functionaries appeared among the pillars; a page-boy emerged by
magic from the region of the chimney-piece like Mephistopheles in
Faust's study; and some guests of both sexes 261 strolled chattering
across the tessellated pavement as they passed from one wing of the
hotel to the other.
'How do, Tom?' said the stranger, grasping the hand of the head
hall-porter, and nodding to the head night-porter.
His voice showed that he was an American, and his demeanour that
he was one of those experienced, wealthy, and kindly travellers who
know the Christian names of all the hall-porters in the world, and
have the trick of securing their intimacy and fealty. He wore a
blue suit and a light gray wideawake, and his fine moustache was
grizzled. In his left hand he carried a brown bag.
'Nicely, thank you, sir,' Tom replied. 'How are you, sir?'
'Oh, about six and six.'
Whereupon both porters laughed heartily.
Tom escorted him to the bureau, and tried to relieve him of his
bag. Inferior lords escorted Tom.
'I guess I'll keep the grip,' said the stranger. 'Mr. Pank will
be around with some more baggage pretty soon. We've expressed the
rest on to the steamer. Well, my dear,' he went
262 on, turning to
Nina, 'you're a fresh face here.'
He looked her steadily in the eyes.
'Yes, I am,' she said, conquered instantly.
Radiant and triumphant, the man brought good-humour into every
face, like some wonderful combination of the sun and the
sea-breeze.
'Give me two bedrooms and a parlour, please,' he commanded.
'First floor?' asked Nina prettily.
'First floor! Well—I should say! And on the Strand,
my dear.'
She bent over her ledgers, blushing.
'Send someone to the 'phone, Tom, and let 'em put me on to the
Regency, will you?' said the stranger.
'Yes, sir. Samuels, go and ring up the Regency
Theatre—quick!'
Swift departure of a lord.
'And ask Alphonse to come up to my bedroom in ten minutes from
now,' the stranger proceeded to Tom. 'I shall want a dandy supper
for fourteen at a quarter after eleven.'
'Yes, sir. No dinner, sir?'
263 'No; we dined on the Pullman. Well, my dear,
figured it out yet?'
'Numbers 102, 120, and 107,' said Nina.
'Keys 102, 120, and 107,' said Tom.
Swift departure of another lord to the pagoda.
'How much?' demanded the stranger.
'The bedrooms are twenty-five shillings, and the sitting-room
two guineas.'
'I guess Mr. Pank won't mind that. Hullo, Pank, you're here! I'm
through. Your number's 102 or 120, which you fancy. Just going to
the 'phone a minute, and then I'll join you upstairs.'
Mr. Pank was a younger man, possessing a thin, astute,
intellectual face. He walked into the hall with noticeable
deliberation. His travelling costume was faultless, but from
beneath his straw hat his black hair sprouted in a somewhat
peculiar fashion over his broad forehead. He smiled lazily and
shrewdly, and without a word disappeared into a lift. Two large
portmanteaus accompanied him.
Presently the elder stranger could be heard battling with the
obstinate idiosyncrasies of a London telephone.
264 'You haven't registered,' Nina called to him
in her tremulous, delicate, captivating voice, as he came out of
the telephone-box.
He advanced to sign, and, taking a pen and leaning on the front
of the bureau, wrote in the visitor's book, in a careful, legible
hand: 'Lionel Belmont, New York.' Having thus written, and still
resting on the right elbow, he raised his right hand a little and
waved the pen like a delicious menace at Nina.
'Mr. Pank hasn't registered, either,' he said slowly, with a
charming affectation of solemnity, as though accusing Mr. Pank of
some appalling crime.
Nina laughed timidly as she pushed his room-ticket across the
page of the big book. She thought that Mr. Lionel Belmont was
perfectly delightful.
'No,' he hasn't,' she said, trying also to be arch; 'but he
must.'
At that moment she happened to glance at the right hand of Mr.
Belmont. In the brilliance of the electric light she could see the
fair skin of the wrist and forearm within the whiteness of his
shirt-sleeve. She stared at what she saw, every muscle tense.
265 'I guess you can round up Mr. Pank yourself,
my dear, later on,' said Lionel Belmont, and turned quickly away,
intent on the next thing.
He did not notice that her large eyes had grown larger and her
pale face paler. In another moment the hall was deserted again. Mr.
Belmont had ascended in the lift, Tom had gone to his rest, and the
head night-porter was concealed in the pagoda. Nina sank down
limply on her stool, her nostrils twitching; she feared she was
about to faint, but this final calamity did not occur. She had,
nevertheless, experienced the greatest shock of her brief life, and
the way of it was thus.
II
Nina Malpas was born amid the embers of one of those fiery
conjugal dramas which occur with romantic frequency in the
provincial towns of the northern Midlands, where industrial
conditions are such as to foster an independent spirit among women
of the lower class generally, and where by long tradition
'character' is allowed to exploit itself more 266 freely than in the
southern parts of our island. Lemuel Malpas was a dashing young
commercial traveller, with what is known as 'an agreeable address,'
in Bursley, one of the Five Towns, Staffordshire. On the strength
of his dash he wooed and married the daughter of an hotel-keeper in
the neighbouring town of Hanbridge. Six months after the
wedding—in other words, at the most dangerous period of the
connubial career—Mrs. Malpas's father died, and Mrs. Malpas
became the absolute mistress of eight thousand pounds.
Lemuel[1] had carefully foreseen this
windfall, and wished to use the money in enterprises of the
earthenware trade. Mrs. Malpas, pretty and vivacious, with a
self-conceit hardened by the adulation of saloon-bars, very
decidedly thought otherwise. Her motto was, 'What's yours is mine,
but what's mine's my own.' The difference was accentuated. Long
mutual resistances were followed by reconciliations, which grew
more and more transitory, and at length both recognised that the
union, not founded on genuine affection, had been a mistake.
267
'Keep your d——d brass!' Lemuel exclaimed one
morning, and he went off on a journey and forgot to come back. A
curious letter dated from Liverpool wished his wife happiness, and
informed her that, since she was well provided for, he had no
scruples about leaving her. Mrs. Malpas was startled at first, but
she soon perceived that what Lemuel had done was exactly what the
brilliant and enterprising Lemuel might have been expected to do.
She jerked up her doll's head, and ejaculated, 'So much the
better!'
A few weeks later she sold the furniture and took rooms in
Scarborough, where, amid pleasurable surroundings, she determined
to lead the joyous life of a grass-widow, free of all cares. Then,
to her astonishment and disgust, Nina was born. She had not
bargained for Nina. She found herself in the tiresome position of a
mother whose explanations of her child lack plausibility. One
lodging-housekeeper to whom she hazarded the statement that Lemuel
was in Australia had saucily replied: 'I thought maybe it was the
North Pole he was gone to!'
This decided Mrs. Malpas. She returned 268 suddenly to the Five
Towns, where at least her reputation was secure. Only a week
previously Lemuel had learnt indirectly that she had left their
native district. He determined thenceforward to forget her
completely. Mrs. Malpas's prettiness was of the fleeting sort.
After Nina's birth she began to get stout and coarse, and the
nostalgia of the saloon-bar, the coffee-room, and the sanded
portico overtook her. The Tiger at Bursley was for sale, a
respectable commercial hotel, the best in the town. She purchased
it, wines, omnibus connection, and all, and developed into the
typical landlady in black silk and gold rings.
In the Tiger Nina was brought up. She was a pretty child from
her earliest years, and received the caresses of all as a matter of
course. She went to a good school, studied the piano, and learnt
dancing, and at sixteen did her hair up. She did as she was told
without fuss, being apparently of a lethargic temperament; she had
all the money and all the clothes that her heart could desire; she
was happy, and in a quiet way she deemed herself a rather
considerable item in the world. When she was eighteen her mother
died miserably of cancer, 269 and it was
discovered that the liabilities of Mrs. Malpas's estate exceeded
its assets—and the Tiger mortgaged up to its value! The
creditors were not angry; they attributed the state of affairs to
illness and the absence of male control, and good-humouredly
accepted what they could get. None the less, Nina, the child of
luxury and sloth, had to start life with several hundreds of pounds
less than nothing. Of her father all trace had been long since
lost. A place was found for her, and for over two years she saw the
world from the office of a famous hotel in Doncaster. Her lethargy,
and an invaluable gift of adapting herself to circumstances, saved
her from any acute unhappiness in the Yorkshire town. Instinctively
she ceased to remember the Tiger and past splendours. (Equally, if
she had married a Duke instead of becoming a book-keeper, she would
have ceased to remember the Tiger and past humility.) Then by good
or ill fortune she had the offer of a situation at the Hôtel
Majestic, Strand, London. The Majestic and the sights thereof woke
up the sleeping soul.
Before her death Mrs. Malpas had told Nina many things about the
vanished Lemuel; 270 among others, the curious detail that he had
two small moles—one hairless, the other hirsute—close
together on the under side of his right wrist. Nina had seen
precisely such marks of identification on the right wrist of Mr.
Lionel Belmont.
She was convinced that Lionel Belmont was her father. There
could not be two men in the world so stamped by nature. She
perceived that in changing his name he had chosen Lionel because of
its similarity to Lemuel. She felt certain, too, that she had
noticed vestiges of the Five Towns accent beneath his Americanisms.
But apart from these reasons, she knew by a superrational instinct
that Lionel Belmont was her father; it was not the call of blood,
but the positiveness of a woman asserting that a thing is so
because she is sure it is so.
III
Nina was not of an imaginative disposition. The romance of this
extraordinary encounter made no appeal to her. She was the sort of
girl that constantly reads novelettes, and yet always, with
fatigued scorn, refers to them as 271 'silly.' Stupid
little Nina was intensely practical at heart, and it was the
practical side of her father's reappearance that engaged her
birdlike mind. She did not stop to reflect that truth is stranger
than fiction. Her tiny heart was not agitated by any ecstatic
ponderings upon the wonder and mystery of fate. She did not feel
strangely drawn towards Lionel Belmont, nor did she feel that he
supplied a something which had always been wanting to her.
On the other hand, her pride—and Nina was very
proud—found much satisfaction in the fact that her father,
having turned up, was so fine, handsome, dashing, good-humoured,
and wealthy. It was well, and excellently well, and delicious, to
have a father like that. The possession of such a father opened up
vistas of a future so enticing and glorious that her present career
became instantly loathsome to her.
It suddenly seemed impossible that she could have tolerated the
existence of a hotel clerk for a single week. Her eyes were opened,
and she saw, as many women have seen, that luxury was an absolute
necessity to her. All her ideas soared with the magic swiftness of
the bean-stalk. 272 And at the same time she was terribly afraid,
unaccountably afraid, to confront Mr. Belmont and tell him that she
was his Nina; he was entirely unaware that he had a Nina.
'I'm your daughter! I know by your moles!'
She whispered the words in her tiny heart, and felt sure that
she could never find courage to say them aloud to that great and
important man. The announcement would be too monstrous, incredible,
and absurd. People would laugh. He would laugh. And Nina could
stand anything better than being laughed at. Even supposing she
proved to him his paternity—she thought of the horridness of
going to lawyers' offices—he might decline to recognise her.
Or he might throw her fifty pounds a year, as one throws sixpence
to an importunate crossing-sweeper, to be rid of her. The United
States existed in her mind chiefly as a country of
highly-remarkable divorce laws, and she thought that Mr. Belmont
might have married again. A fashionable and arrogant Mrs. Belmont,
and a dazzling Miss Belmont, aged possibly eighteen, might arrive,
both of them 273 steeped in all conceivable luxury, at any
moment. Where would Nina be then, with her
two-and-eleven-pence-halfpenny blouse from Glave's?...
Mr. Belmont, accompanied by Alphonse, the head-waiter in the
salle à manger, descended in the lift and crossed the
hall to the portico, where he stood talking for a few seconds. Mr.
Belmont turned, and, as he conversed with Alphonse, gazed absently
in the direction of the bureau. He looked straight through the
pretty captive. After all, despite his superficial heartiness, she
could be nothing to him—so rich, assertive, and truly
important. A hansom was called for him, and he departed; she
observed that he was in evening dress now.
No! Her cause was just; but it was too startling—that was
what was the matter with it.
Then she told herself she would write to Lionel Belmont. She
would write a letter that night.
At nine-thirty she was off duty. She went upstairs to her perch
in the roof, and sat on her bed for over two hours. Then she came
274
down again to the bureau with some bluish note-paper and envelopes
in her hand, and, in response to the surprised question of the
pink-frocked colleague who had taken her place, she explained that
she wanted to write a letter.
'You do look that bad, Miss Malpas,' said the other girl, who
made a speciality of compassion.
'Do I?' said Nina.
'Yes, you do. What have you got on, now, my poor
dear?'
'What's that to you? I'll thank you to mind your own business,
Miss Bella Perkins.'
Usually Nina was not soon ruffled; but that night all her nerves
were exasperated and exceedingly sensitive.
'Oh!' said the girl. 'What price the Duchess of Doncaster? And I
was just going to wish you a nice day to-morrow for your holiday,
too.'
Nina seated herself at the table to write the letter. An
electric light burned directly over her frizzy head. She wrote a
weak but legible and regular back-hand. She hated writing letters,
partly because she was dubious about 275 her spelling, and
partly because of an obscure but irrepressible suspicion that her
letters were of necessity silly. She pondered for a long time, and
then wrote: 'Dear Mr. Belmont,—I venture——' She
made a new start: 'Dear Sir,—I hope you will not think
me——' And a third attempt: 'My dear
Father——' No! it was preposterous. It could no more be
written than it could be said.
The situation was too much for simple Nina.
Suddenly the grand circular hall of the Majestic was filled with
a clamour at once charming and fantastic. There was chattering of
musical, gay American voices, pattering of elegant feet on the
tessellated pavement, the unique incomparable sound of the
frou-frou of many frocks; and above all this the rich tones
of Mr. Lionel Belmont. Nina looked up and saw her radiant father
the centre of a group of girls all young, all beautiful, all
stylish, all with picture hats, all self-possessed, all sparkling,
doubtless the recipients of the dandy supper.
Oh, how insignificant and homicidal Nina felt!
'Thirteen of you!' exclaimed Lionel Belmont,
276 pulling his
superb moustache. 'Two to a hansom. I guess I'll want six and a
half hansoms, boy.'
There was an explosion of delicious laughter, and the page-boy
grinned, ran off, and began whistling in the portico like a vexed
locomotive. The thirteen fair, shepherded by Lionel Belmont, passed
out into the murmurous summer night of the Strand. Cab after cab
drove up, and Nina saw that her father, after filling each cab,
paid each cabman. In three minutes the dream-like scene was over.
Mr. Belmont re-entered the hotel, winked humorously at the occupant
of the pagoda, ignored the bureau, and departed to his rooms.
Nina ripped her inchoate letters into small pieces, and, with a
tart good-night to Miss Bella Perkins, who was closing her ledgers,
the hour being close upon twelve-thirty, she passed sedately,
stiffly, as though in performance of some vestal's ritual, up the
grand staircase. Turning to the right at the first landing, she
traversed a long corridor which was no part of the route to her
cubicle on the ninth floor. This corridor was lighted by glowing
sparks, which hung on yellow cords from the central 277 line of
the ceiling; underfoot was a heavy but narrow crimson patterned
carpet with a strip of polished oak parquet on either side of it.
Exactly along the central line of the carpet Nina tripped,
languorously, like an automaton, and exactly over her head
glittered the line of electric sparks. The corridor and the journey
seemed to be interminable, and Nina on some inscrutable and mystic
errand. At length she moved aside from the religious line, went
into a service cabinet, and emerged with a small bunch of
pass-keys. No. 107 was Lionel Belmont's sitting-room; No. 102, his
bedroom, was opposite to 107. No. 108, another sitting-room, was,
as Nina knew, unoccupied. She noiselessly let herself into No. 108,
closed the door, and stood still. After a minute she switched on
the light. These two rooms, Nos. 108 and 107, had once
communicated, but, as space grew precious with the growing success
of the Majestic, they had been finally separated, and the door
between them locked and masked by furniture. By reason of the door,
Nina could hear Lionel Belmont moving to and fro in No. 107. She
listened a long time. Then, involuntarily, she yawned with
fatigue.
278 'How silly of me to be here!' she thought.
'What good will this do me?'
She extinguished the light and opened the door to leave. At the
same instant the door of No. 107, three feet off, opened. She drew
back with a start of horror. Suppose she had collided with her
father on the landing! Timorously she peeped out, and saw Lionel
Belmont, in his shirt-sleeves, disappear round the corner.
'He is going to talk with his friend Mr. Pank,' Nina thought,
knowing that No. 120 lay at some little distance round that
corner.
Mr. Belmont had left the door of No. 107 slightly ajar. An
unseen and terrifying force compelled Nina to venture into the
corridor, and then to push the door of No. 107 wide open. The same
force, not at all herself, quite beyond herself, seemed to impel
her by the shoulders into the room. As she stood unmistakably
within her father's private sitting-room, scared, breathing
rapidly, inquisitive, she said to herself:
'I shall hear him coming back, and I can run out before he turns
the corner of the corridor.' And she kept her little pink ears
alert.
279 She looked about the softly brilliant room,
such an extravagant triumph of luxurious comfort as twenty years
ago would have aroused comment even in Mayfair; but there were
scores of similar rooms in the Majestic. No one thought twice of
them. Her father's dress-coat was thrown arrogantly over a Louis
Quatorze chair, and this careless flinging of the expensive shining
coat across the gilded chair somehow gave Nina a more intimate
appreciation of her father's grandeur and of the great and glorious
life he led. She longed to recline indolently in a priceless
tea-gown on the couch by the fireplace and issue orders.... She
approached the writing-table, littered with papers, documents, in
scores and hundreds. To the left was the brown bag. It was locked,
and very heavy, she thought. To the right was a pile of telegrams.
She picked up one, and read:
'Pank, Grand Hotel, Birmingham. Why not burgle hotel?
Simplest most effective plan and solves all
difficulties.—BELMONT.'
She read it twice, crunched it in her left hand, and picked up
another one:
280
'Pank, Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool. Your objection absurd. See
safe in bureau at Majestic. Quite easy. Scene with girl second
evening.—BELMONT.'
The thing flashed blindingly upon her. Her father and Mr. Pank
belonged to the swell mob of which she had heard and seen so much
at Doncaster. She at once became the excessively knowing and
suspicious hotel employé, to whom every stranger is a rogue
until he has proved the contrary. Had she lived through three St.
Leger weeks for nothing? At the hotel at Doncaster, what they
didn't know about thieves and sharpers was not knowledge. The
landlord kept a loaded revolver in his desk there during the week.
And she herself had been provided with a whistle which she was to
blow at the slightest sign of a row; she had blown it once, and
seven policemen had appeared within thirty seconds. The landlord
used to tell tales of masterly and huge scoundrelism that would
make Charles Peace turn in his grave. And the landlord had ever
insisted that no one, no one at all, could always distinguish with
certainty between a real gent and a swell-mobsman.
281 So her father and Mr. Pank had deceived
everyone in the hotel except herself, and they meant to rob the
safe in the bureau to-morrow night. Of course Mr. Lionel Belmont
was a villain, or he would not have deserted her poor dear mother;
it was annoying, but indubitable.... Even now he was maturing his
plans round the corner with that Mr. Pank.... Burglars always went
about in shirt-sleeves.... The brown bag contained the
tools....
The shock was frightful, disastrous, tragic; but it had solved
the situation by destroying it. Practically, Nina no longer had a
father. He had existed for about four hours as a magnificent
reality, full of possibilities; he now ceased to be
recognisable.
She was about to pick up a third telegram when a slight noise
caused her to turn swiftly; she had forgotten to keep her little
pink ears alert. Her father stood in the doorway. He was certainly
the victim of some extraordinary emotion; his face worked; he
seemed at a loss what to do or say; he seemed pained, confused,
even astounded. Simple, foolish Nina had upset the balance of his
equations.
Then he resumed his self-control and came 282 forward into the
room with a smile intended to be airy. Meanwhile Nina had not
moved. One is inclined to pity the artless and defenceless girl in
this midnight duel of wits with a shrewd, resourceful, and
unscrupulous man of the world. But one's pity should not be
lavished on an undeserving object. Though Nina trembled, she was
mistress of herself. She knew just where she was, and just how to
behave. She was as impregnable as Gibraltar.
'Well,' said Mr. Lionel Belmont, genially gazing at her pose,
'you do put snap into it, any way.'
'Into what?' she was about to inquire, but prudently she held
her tongue. Drawing, herself up with the gesture of an offended and
unapproachable queen, the little thing sailed past him, close past
her own father, and so out of the room.
'Say!' she heard him remark: 'let's straighten this thing out,
eh?'
But she heroically ignored him, thinking the while that, with
all his sins, he was attractive enough. She still held the first
telegram in her long, thin fingers.
So ended the nocturne.
283
IV
At five o'clock the next morning Nina's trifling nose was
pressed against the windowpane of her cubicle. In the enormous
slate roof of the Majestic are three rows of round windows, like
port-holes. Out of the highest one, at the extremity of the left
wing, Nina looked. From thence she could see five other vast
hotels, and the yard of Charing Cross Station, with three
night-cabs drawn up to the kerb, and a red van of W.H. Smith and
Son disappearing into the station. The Strand was quite empty. It
was a strange world of sleep and grayness and disillusion. Within a
couple of hundred yards or so of her thousands of people lay
asleep, and they would all soon wake into the disillusion, and the
Strand would wake, and the first omnibus of all the omnibuses would
come along....
Never had simple Nina felt so sad and weary. She was determined
to give up her father. She was bound to tell the manager of her
discovery, for Nina was an honest servant, and she was piqued in
her honesty. No one should know that Lionel Belmont was her
father.... 284 She saw before her the task of forgetting him
and forgetting the rich dreams of which he had been the origin. She
was once more a book-keeper with no prospects.
At eight she saw the manager in the managerial room. Mr. Reuben
was a young Jew, aged about thirty-four, with a cold but
indestructibly polite manner. He was a great man, and knew it; he
had almost invented the Majestic.
She told him her news; it was impossible for foolish Nina to
conceal her righteousness and her sense of her importance.
'Whom did you say, Miss Malpas?' asked Mr. Reuben.
'Mr. Lionel Belmont—at least, that's what he calls
himself.'
'Calls himself, Miss Malpas?'
'Here's one of the telegrams.'
Mr. Reuben read it, looked at little Nina, and smiled; he never
laughed.
'Is it possible, Miss Malpas,' said he, 'that you don't know who
Mr. Belmont and Mr. Pank are?' And then, as she shook her head, he
continued in his impassive, precise way: 'Mr. Belmont is one of the
principal theatrical 285 managers in the
United States. Mr. Pank is one of the principal playwrights in the
United States. Mr. Pank's melodrama 'Nebraska' is now being played
at the Regency by Mr. Belmont's own American company. Another of
Mr. Belmont's companies starts shortly for a tour in the provinces
with the musical comedy 'The Dolmenico Doll.' I believe that Mr.
Pank and Mr. Belmont are now writing a new melodrama, and as they
have both been travelling, but not together, I expect that these
telegrams relate to that melodrama. Did you suppose that
safe-burglars wire their plans to each other like this?' He waved
the telegram with a gesture of fatigue.
Silly, ruined Nina made no answer.
'Do you ever read the papers—the Telegraph or the
Mail, Miss Malpas?'
'N-no, sir.'
'You ought to, then you wouldn't be so ignorant and silly. A
hotel-clerk can't know too much. And, by-the-way, what were you
doing in Mr. Belmont's room last night, when you found these
wonderful telegrams?'
'I went there—I went there—to——'
'Don't cry, please, it won't help you. You 286 must leave here
to-day. You've been here three weeks, I think. I'll tell Mr. Smith
to pay you your month's wages. You don't know enough for the
Majestic, Miss Malpas. Or perhaps you know too much. I'm sorry. I
had thought you would suit us. Keep straight, that's all I have to
say to you. Go back to Doncaster, or wherever it is you came from.
Leave before five o'clock. That will do.'
With a godlike air, Mr. Reuben swung round his office-chair and
faced his desk. He tried not to perceive that there was a
mysterious quality about this case which he had not quite
understood. Nina tripped piteously out.
In the whole of London Nina had one acquaintance, and an hour or
so later, after drinking some tea, she set forth to visit this
acquaintance. The weight of her own foolishness, fatuity,
silliness, and ignorance was heavy upon her. And, moreover, she had
been told that Mr. Lionel Belmont had already departed back to
America, his luggage being marked for the American Transport
Line.
She was primly walking, the superlative of the miserable, past
the façade of the hotel, 287 when someone sprang
out of a cab and spoke to her. And it was Mr. Lionel Belmont.
'Get right into this hansom, Miss Malpas,' he said kindly, 'and
I guess we'll talk it out.'
'Talk what out?' she thought.
But she got in.
'Marble Arch, and go up Regent Street, and don't hurry,' said
Mr. Belmont to the cabman.
'How did he know my name?' she asked herself.
'A hansom's the most private place in London,' he said after a
pause.
It certainly did seem to her very cosy and private, and her
nearness to one of the principal theatrical managers in America was
almost startling. Her white frock, with the black velvet
decorations, touched his gray suit.
'Now,' he said, 'I do wish you'd tell me why you were in my
parlour last night. Honest.'
'What for?' she parried, to gain time.
Should she begin to disclose her identity?
'Because—well, because—oh, look here, 288 my
girl, I want to be on very peculiar terms with you. I want to
straighten out everything. You'll be sort of struck, but I'll be
bound to tell you I'm your father. Now, don't faint or
anything.'
'Oh, I knew that!' she gasped. 'I saw the moles on your wrist
when your were registering—mother told me about them. Oh, if
I had only known you knew!'
They looked at one another.
'It was only the day before yesterday I found out I possessed
such a thing as a daughter. I had a kind of fancy to go around to
the old spot. This notion of me having a daughter struck me
considerable, and I concluded to trace her and size her up at
once.' Nina was bound to smile. 'So your poor mother's been dead
three years?'
'Yes,' said Nina.
'Ah! don't let us talk about that. I feel I can't say just the
right thing.... And so you knew me by those pips.' He pulled up his
right sleeve. 'Was that why you came up to my parlour?'
Nina nodded, and Lionel Belmont sighed with relief.
289 'Why didn't you tell me at once, my dear, who
you where?'
'I didn't dare,' she smiled; 'I was afraid. I thought you
wouldn't——'
'Listen,' he said; 'I've wanted someone like you for years,
years, and years. I've got no one to look after——'
'Then why didn't you tell me at once who you
were?' she questioned with adorable pertness.
'Oh!' he laughed; 'how could I—plump like that? When I saw
you first, in the bureau, the stricken image of your mother at your
age, I was nearly down. But I came up all right, didn't I, my dear?
I acted it out well, didn't I?'
The hansom was rolling through Hyde Park, and the sunshiny hour
was eleven in June. Nina looked forth on the gay and brilliant
scene: rhododendrons, duchesses, horses, dandies—the
incomparable wealth and splendour of the capital. She took a long
breath, and began to be happy for the rest of her life. She felt
that, despite her plain 290 frock, she was in
this picture. Her father had told her that his income was rising on
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, and he would thank her
to spend it. Her father had told her, when she had confessed the
scene with Mr. Reuben and what led to it, that she had grit, and
that the mistake was excusable, and that a girl as pretty as she
was didn't want to be as fly as Mr. Reuben had said. Her father had
told her that he was proud of her, and he had not been so rude as
to laugh at her blunder.
She felt that she was about to enter upon the true and only
vocation of a dainty little morsel—namely, to spend money
earned by other people. She thought less homicidally now of the
thirteen chorus-girls of the previous night.
'Say,' said her father, 'I sail this afternoon for New York,
Nina.'
'They said you'd gone, at the hotel.'
'Only my baggage. The Minnehaha clears at five. I guess I
want you to come along too. On the voyage we'll get acquainted, and
tell each other things.'
'Suppose I say I won't?'
291 She spoke despotically, as the pampered
darling should.
'Then I'll wait for the next boat. But it'll be awkward.'
'Then I'll come. But I've got no things.'
He pushed up the trap-door.
'Driver, Bond Street. And get on to yourself, for goodness' sake!
Hurry!'
'You told me not to hurry,' grumbled the cabby.
'And now I tell you to hustle. See?'
'Shall you want me to call myself Belmont?' Nina asked.
'I chose it because it was a fine ten-horse-power name twenty
years ago,' said her father; and she murmured that she liked the
name very much.
As Lionel Belmont the Magnificent paid the cabman, and Nina
walked across the pavement into one of the most famous repositories
of expensive frippery in the world, she thrilled with the
profoundest pleasure her tiny soul was capable of. Foolish, simple
Nina had achieved the nec plus ultra of her languorous
dreams.
295
CLARICE OF THE AUTUMN CONCERTS
I
'What did you say your name was?' asked Otto, the famous concert
manager.
'Clara Toft.'
'That won't do,' he said roughly.
'My real proper name is Clarice,' she added, blushing.
'But——'
'That's better, that's better.' His large, dark face smiled
carelessly. 'Clarice—and stick an "e" on to
Toft—Clarice Tofte. Looks like either French or German then.
I'll send you the date. It'll be the second week in September. And
you can come round to the theatre and try the
piano—Bechstein.'
'And what do you think I had better play, Mr. Otto?'
'You must play what you have just played, 296 of course.
Tschaikowsky's all the rage just now. Your left hand's very weak,
especially in the last movement. You've got to make more
noise—at my concerts. And see here, Miss Toft, don't you go
and make a fool of me. I believe you have a great future, and I'm
backing my opinion. Don't you go and make a fool of me.'
'I shall play my very best,' she smiled nervously. 'I'm awfully
obliged to you, Mr. Otto.'
'Well,' he said, 'you ought to be.'
At the age of fifteen her father, an earthenware manufacturer,
and the flamboyant Alderman of Turnhill, in the Five Towns, had let
her depart to London to the Royal College of Music. Thence, at
nineteen, she had proceeded to the Conservatoire of Liége.
At twenty-two she could play the great concert pieces—Liszt's
'Rhapsodies Hongroises,' Chopin's Ballade, Op. 47, Beethoven's Op.
111, etc.—in concert style, and she was the wonder of the
Five Towns when she visited Turnhill. But in London she had
obtained neither engagements nor pupils: she had never believed in
herself. She knew of dozens of 297 pianists whom she
deemed more brilliant than little, pretty, modest Clara Toft; and
after her father's death and the not surprising revelation of his
true financial condition, she settled with her faded, captious
mother in Turnhill as a teacher of the pianoforte, and did
nicely.
Then, when she was twenty-six, and content in provincialism, she
had met during an August holiday at Llandudno her old fellow pupil,
Albert Barbellion, who was conducting the Pier concerts. Barbellion
had asked her to play at a 'soirée musicale' which he gave
one night in the ball-room of his hotel, and she had performed
Tschaikowsky's immense and lurid Slavonic Sonata; and the
unparalleled Otto, renowned throughout the British Empire for
Otto's Bohemian Autumn Nightly Concerts at Covent Garden Theatre,
had happened to hear her and that seldom played sonata for the
first time. It was a wondrous chance. Otto's large, picturesque,
extempore way of inviting her to appear at his promenade concerts
reminded her of her father.
298
II
In the bleak three-cornered artists'-room she could faintly hear
the descending impetuous velocities of the Ride of the Walkyries.
She was waiting in her new yellow dress, waiting painfully. Otto
rushed in, a glass in his hand.
'You all right?' he questioned sharply.
'Oh, yes,' she said, getting up from the cane-chair.
'Let me see you stand on one leg,' he said; and then, because
she hesitated: 'Go on, quick! Stand on one leg. It's a good test.'
So she stood on one leg, foolishly smiling. 'Here, drink this,' he
ordered, and she had to drink brandy-and-soda out of the glass.
'You're better now,' he remarked; and decidedly, though her throat
tingled and she coughed, she felt equal to anything at that
moment.
A stout, middle-aged woman, in a rather shabby opera cloak,
entered the room.
'Ah, Cornelia!' exclaimed Otto grandly.
'My dear Otto!' the woman responded, wrinkling her wonderfully
enamelled cheeks.
'Miss Toft, let me introduce you to 299 Madame Lopez.' He
turned to the newcomer. 'Keep her calm for me, bright star, will
you?'
Then Otto went, and Clarice was left alone with the world-famous
operatic soprano, who was advertised to sing that night the Shadow
Song from 'Dinorah.'
'Where did he pick you up, my dear?' the decayed diva inquired
maternally.
Clarice briefly explained.
'You aren't paying him anything, are you?'
'Oh, no!' said Clarice, shocked. 'But I get no fee this
time——'
'Of course not, my dear,' the Lopez cut her short. 'It's all
right so long as you aren't paying him anything to let you go on.
Now run along.'
Clarice's heart stopped. The call-boy, with his cockney twang,
had pronounced her name.
She moved forward, and, by dint of following the call-boy, at
length reached the stage. Applause—good-natured
applause—seemed to roll towards her from the uttermost parts
of the vast auditorium. She realized with a start that this
applause was exclusively for her. She sat down to the piano, and
there ensued a 300 death-like silence—a silence broken only
by the striking of matches and the tinkle of the embowered fountain
in front of the stage. She had a consciousness, rather than a
vision, of a floor of thousands of upturned faces below her, and
tier upon tier of faces rising above her and receding to the
illimitable dark distances of the gallery. She heard a door bang,
and perceived that some members of the orchestra were creeping
quietly out at the back. Then she plunged, dizzy, into the sonata,
as into a heaving and profound sea. The huge concert piano
resounded under the onslaught of her broad hands. When she had
played ten bars she knew with an absolute conviction that she would
do justice to her talent. She could see, as it were, the entire
sonata stretched out in detail before her like a road over which
she had to travel....
At the end of the first movement the clapping enheartened her;
she smiled confidently at the conductor, who, unemployed during her
number, sat on a chair under his desk. Before recommencing she
gazed boldly at the house, and certain placards—'Smoking
permitted,' 'Emergency exit,' 'Ices,' and 'Fancy Dress 301
Balls'—were fixed for ever on the retina of her eye. At the
end of the second movement there was more applause, and the
conductor tapped appreciation with his stick against the pillar of
his desk; the leader of the listless orchestra also tapped with his
fiddle-bow and nodded. It seemed to her now that she more and more
dominated the piano, and that she rendered the great finale with
masterful and fierce assurance....
She was pleased with herself as she banged the last massive
chord. And the applause, the clapping, the hammering of sticks,
astounded her, staggered her. She might have died of happiness
while she bowed and bowed again. She ran off the stage triumphant,
and the applause seemed to assail her little figure from all
quarters and overwhelm it. As she stood waiting, concealed behind a
group of palms, it suddenly occurred to her that, after all, she
had underestimated herself. She saw her rosy future as the spoiled
darling of continental capitals. The hail of clapping persisted,
and the apparition of Otto violently waved her to return to the
stage. She returned, bowed her passionate exultation with burning
face and 302 trembling knees, and retired. The clapping
continued. Yes, she would be compelled to grant an encore—to
grant one. She would grant it like a honeyed but imperious
queen.
Suddenly she heard the warning tap of the conductor's baton; the
applause was hushed as though by a charm, and the orchestra broke
into the overture to 'Zampa.' She could not understand, she could
not think. As she tripped tragically to the artists'-room in her
new yellow dress she said to herself that the conductor must have
made some mistake, and that——
'Very nice, my dear,' said the Lopez kindly to her. 'You got
quite a call—quite a call.'
She waited for Otto to come and talk to her.
At length the Lopez was summoned, and Clarice followed to listen
to her. And when the Lopez had soared with strong practised flight
through the brilliant intricacy of the Shadow Song, Clarice became
aware what real applause sounded like from the stage. It shook the
stage as the old favourite of two generations, wearing her set
smile, waddled back to the debutante. Scores of voices 303
hoarsely shouted 'Encore!' and 'Last Rose of Summer,' and with a
proud sigh the Lopez went on again, bowing.
Clarice saw nothing more of Otto, who doubtless had other birds
to snare. The next day only three daily papers mentioned the
concert at all. In fact, Otto expected press notices but once a
week. All three papers praised the matchless Lopez in her Shadow
Song. One referred to Clarice as talented; another called her
well-intentioned; the third merely said that she had played. The
short dream of artistic ascendancy lay in fragments around her. She
was a sensible girl, and stamped those iridescent fragments into
dust.
III
The Staffordshire Signal contained the following
advertisement: 'Miss Clara Toft, solo pianist, of the Otto Autumn
Concerts, London, will resume lessons on the 1st proximo at Liszt
House, Turnhill. Terms on application.' At thirty Clarice married
James Sillitoe, the pianoforte dealer in Market Square, Turnhill,
and captious old Mrs. Toft formed part of the new
304 household. At
thirty-four Clarice possessed a little girl and two little boys,
twins. Sillitoe was a money-maker, and she no longer gave
lessons.
Happy? Perhaps not unhappy.
I
Rain was falling—it had fallen steadily through the
night—but the sky showed promise of fairer weather. As the
first streaks of dawn appeared, the wind died away, and the young
leaves on the trees were almost silent. The birds were insistently
clamorous, vociferating times without number that it was a healthy
spring morning and good to be alive.
A little, bedraggled crowd stood before the park gates, awaiting
the hour named on the notice board when they would be admitted to
such lodging and shelter as iron seats and overspreading branches
might afford. A weary, patient-eyed, dogged crowd—a dozen
men, a boy of thirteen, and a couple of women, both past middle
age—which had been gathering 308 slowly since five
o'clock. The boy appeared to be the least uncomfortable. His feet
were bare, but he had slept well in an area in Grosvenor Place, and
was not very damp yet. The women had nodded on many doorsteps, and
were soaked. They stood apart from the men, who seemed unconscious
of their existence. The men were exactly such as one would have
expected to find there—beery and restless as to the eyes,
quaintly shod, and with nondescript greenish clothes which for the
most part bore traces of the yoke of the sandwich board. Only one
amongst them was different.
He was young, and his cap, and manner of wearing it, gave sign
of the sea. His face showed the rough outlines of his history. Yet
it was a transparently honest face, very pale, but still boyish and
fresh enough to make one wonder by what rapid descent he had
reached his present level. Perhaps the receding chin, the heavy,
pouting lower lip, and the ceaselessly twitching mouth offered a
key to the problem.
'Say, Darkey!' he said.
'Well?'
'How much longer?'
309 'Can't ye see the clock? It's staring ye in
the face.'
'No. Something queer's come over my eyes.'
Darkey was a short, sturdy man, who kept his head down and his
hands deep in his pockets. The raindrops clinging to the rim of an
ancient hat fell every now and then into his gray beard, which
presented a drowned appearance. He was a person of long and varied
experiences; he knew that queer feeling in the eyes, and his heart
softened.
'Come, lean against the pillar,' he said, 'if you don't want to
tumble. Three of brandy's what you want. There's four minutes to
wait yet.'
With body flattened to the masonry, legs apart, and head thrown
back, Darkey's companion felt more secure, and his mercurial
spirits began to revive. He took off his cap, and brushing back his
light brown curly hair with the hand which held it, he looked down
at Darkey through half-closed eyes, the play of his features
divided between a smile and a yawn.
He had a lively sense of humour, and the 310 irony of his
situation was not lost on him. He took a grim, ferocious delight in
calling up the might-have-beens and the 'fatuous ineffectual
yesterdays' of life. There is a certain sardonic satisfaction to be
gleaned from a frank recognition of the fact that you are the
architect of your own misfortune. He felt that satisfaction, and
laughed at Darkey, who was one of those who moan about 'ill-luck'
and 'victims of circumstance.'
'No doubt,' he would say, 'you're a very deserving fellow,
Darkey, who's been treated badly. I'm not.'
To have attained such wisdom at twenty-five is not to have lived
altogether in vain.
A park-keeper presently arrived to unlock the gates, and the
band of outcasts straggled indolently towards the nearest sheltered
seats. Some went to sleep at once, in a sitting posture. Darkey
produced a clay pipe, and, charging it with a few shreds of tobacco
laboriously gathered from his waistcoat pocket, began to smoke. He
was accustomed to this sort of thing, and with a pipe in his mouth
could contrive to be moderately philosophical upon occasion. He
looked curiously at his companion, 311 who lay stretched at
full length on another bench.
'I say, pal,' he remarked, 'I've known ye two days; ye've never
told me yer name, and I don't ask ye to. But I see ye've not slep'
in a park before.'
'You hit it, Darkey; but how?'
'Well, if the keeper catches ye lying down, he'll be on to ye.
Lying down's not allowed.'
The man raised himself on his elbow.
'Really now,' he said; 'that's interesting. But I think I'll
give the keeper the opportunity of moving me. Why, it's quite fine,
the sun's coming out, and the sparrows are hopping
round—cheeky little devils! I'm not sure that I don't feel
jolly.'
'I wish I'd got the price of a pint about me,' sighed Darkey,
and the other man dropped his head and appeared to sleep. Then
Darkey dozed a little, and heard in his waking sleep the heavy,
crunching tread of an approaching park-keeper; he started up to
warn his companion, but thought better of it, and closed his eyes
again.
'Now then, there,' the park-keeper shouted to the man with the
sailor's cap, 'get up! 312 This ain't a
fourpenny doss, you know. No lying down.'
A rough shake accompanied the words, and the man sat up.
'All right, my friend.'
The keeper, who was a good-humoured man, passed on without
further objurgation.
The face of the younger man had grown whiter.
'Look here, Darkey,' he said, 'I believe I'm done for.'
'Never say die.'
'No, just die without speaking.'
His head fell forward and his eyes closed.
'At any rate, this is better than some deaths I've seen,' he
began again with a strange accession of liveliness. 'Darkey, did I
tell you the story of the five Japanese girls?'
'What, in Suez Bay?' said Darkey, who had heard many sea-stories
during the last two days, and recollected them but hazily.
'No, man. This was at Nagasaki. We were taking in a cargo of
coal for Hong Kong. Hundreds of little Jap girls pass the coal from
hand to hand over the ship's side in tiny baskets that hold about a
plateful. In that way you 313 can get three
thousand tons aboard in two days.'
'Talking of platefuls reminds me of sausage and mash,' said
Darkey.
'Don't interrupt. Well, five of these gay little dolls wanted to
go to Hong Kong, and they arranged with the Chinese sailors to stow
away; I believe their friends paid those cold-blooded fiends
something to pass them down food on the voyage, and give them an
airing at nights. We had a particularly lively trip, battened
everything down tight, and scarcely uncovered till we got into
port. Then I and another man found those five girls among the
coal.'
'Dead, eh?'
'They'd simply torn themselves to pieces. Their bits of frock
things were in strips, and they were scratched deep from top to
toe. The Chinese had never troubled their heads about them at all,
although they must have known it meant death. You may bet there was
a row. The Japanese authorities make you search ship before
sailing, now.'
'Well?'
'Well, I shan't die like that. That's all.'
314 He stretched himself out once more, and for
ten minutes neither spoke. The park-keeper strolled up again.
'Get up, there!' he said shortly and gruffly.
'Up ye get, mate,' added Darkey, but the man on the bench did
not stir. One look at his face sufficed to startle the keeper, and
presently two policemen were wheeling an ambulance cart to the
hospital. Darkey followed, gave such information as he could, and
then went his own ways.
II
In the afternoon the patient regained full consciousness. His
eyes wandered vacantly about the illimitable ward, with its rows of
beds stretching away on either side of him. A woman with a white
cap, a white apron, and white wristbands bent over him, and he felt
something gratefully warm passing down his throat. For just one
second he was happy. Then his memory returned, and the nurse saw
that he was crying. When he caught the nurse's eye he ceased, and
looked steadily at the distant ceiling.
315 'You're better?'
'Yes.'
He tried to speak boldly, decisively, nonchalantly. He was
filled with a sense of physical shame, the shame which bodily
helplessness always experiences in the presence of arrogant,
patronizing health. He would have got up and walked briskly away if
he could. He hated to be waited on, to be humoured, to be examined
and theorized about. This woman would be wanting to feel his pulse.
She should not; he would turn cantankerous. No doubt they had been
saying to each other, 'And so young, too! How sad!' Confound
them!
'Have you any friends that you would like to send for?'
'No, none.'
The girl—she was only a girl—looked at him, and
there was that in her eye which overcame him.
'None at all?'
'Not that I want to see.'
'Are your parents alive?'
'My mother is, but she lives away in the Five Towns.'
316 'You've not seen her lately, perhaps?'
He did not reply, and the nurse spoke again, but her voice
sounded indistinct and far off.
When he awoke it was night. At the other end of the ward was a
long table covered with a white cloth, and on this table a
lamp.
In the ring of light under the lamp was an open book, an
inkstand and a pen. A nurse—not his nurse—was
standing by the table, her fingers idly drumming the cloth, and
near her a man in evening dress. Perhaps a doctor. They were
conversing in low tones. In the middle of the ward was an open
stove, and the restless flames were reflected in all the brass
knobs of the bedsteads and in some shining metal balls which hung
from an unlighted chandelier. His part of the ward was almost in
darkness. A confused, subdued murmur of little coughs, breathings,
rustlings, was continually audible, and sometimes it rose above the
conversation at the table. He noticed all these things. He became
conscious, too, of a strangely familiar smell. What was it? Ah,
yes! Acetic acid; his mother used it for her rheumatics.
317 Suddenly, magically, a great longing came over
him. He must see his mother, or his brothers, or his little
sister—someone who knew him, someone who belonged to
him. He could have cried out in his desire. This one thought
consumed all his faculties. If his mother could but walk in just
now through that doorway! If only old Spot even could amble up to
him, tongue out and tail furiously wagging! He tried to sit up, and
he could not move! Then despair settled on him, and weighed him
down. He closed his eyes.
The doctor and the nurse came slowly up the ward, pausing here
and there. They stopped before his bed, and he held his breath.
'Not roused up again, I suppose?'
'No.'
'H'm! He may flicker on for forty-eight hours. Not more.'
They went on, and with a sigh of relief he opened his eyes
again. The doctor shook hands with the nurse, who returned to the
table and sat down.
Death! The end of all this! Yes, it was coming. He felt it. His
had been one of 318 those wasted lives of which he used to read in
books. How strange! Almost amusing! He was one of those sons who
bring sorrow and shame into a family. Again, how strange! What a
coincidence that he—just he and not the man in the
next bed—should be one of those rare, legendary
good-for-nothings who go recklessly to ruin. And yet, he was sure
that he was not such a bad fellow after all. Only somehow he had
been careless. Yes, careless; that was the word ... nothing
worse.... As to death, he was indifferent. Remembering his father's
death, he reflected that it was probably less disturbing to die
one's self than to watch another pass.
He smelt the acetic acid once more, and his thoughts reverted to
his mother. Poor mother! No, great mother! The grandeur of her
life's struggle filled him with a sense of awe. Strange that until
that moment he had never seen the heroic side of her humdrum,
commonplace existence! He must write to her, now, at once, before
it was too late. His letter would trouble her, add another wrinkle
to her face, but he must write; she must know that he had been
thinking of her.
319 'Nurse!' he cried out, in a thin, weak
voice.
'Ssh!'
She was by his side directly, but not before he had lost
consciousness again.
The following morning he managed with infinite labour to scrawl
a few lines:
'DEAR MAMMA,
'You will be surprised but not glad to get this letter. I'm done
for, and you will never see me again. I'm sorry for what I've done,
and how I've treated you, but it's no use saying anything now. If
Pater had only lived he might have kept me in order. But you were
too kind, you know. You've had a hard struggle these last six
years, and I hope Arthur and Dick will stand by you better than I
did, now they are growing up. Give them my love, and kiss little
Fannie for me.
'WILLIE.
'Mrs. Hancock——'
He got no further with the address.
320
III
By some turn of the wheel, Darkey gathered several shillings
during the next day or two, and, feeling both elated and
benevolent, he called one afternoon at the hospital, 'just to
inquire like.' They told him the man was dead.
'By the way, he left a letter without an address. Mrs.
Hancock—here it is.'
'That'll be his mother; he did tell me about her—lived at
Knype, Staffordshire, he said. I'll see to it.'
They gave Darkey the letter.
'So his name's Hancock,' he soliloquized, when he got into the
street. 'I knew a girl of that name—once. I'll go and have a
pint of four-half.'
At nine o'clock that night Darkey was still consuming four-half,
and relating certain adventures by sea which, he averred, had
happened to himself. He was very drunk.
'Yes,' he said, 'and them five lil' gals was lying there without
a stitch on 'em, dead as meat; 's 'true as I'm 'ere. I've seen a
thing or two in my time, I can tell ye.'
321 'Talking about these Anarchists—' said a
man who appeared anxious to change the subject.
'An—kists,' Darkey interrupted. 'I tell ye what I'd do
with that muck.'
He stopped to light his pipe, looked in vain for a match, felt
in his pockets, and pulled out a piece of paper—the
letter.
'I tell you what I'd do. I'd—'
He slowly and meditatively tore the letter in two, dropped one
piece on the floor, thrust the other into a convenient gas-jet, and
applied it to the tobacco.
'I'd get 'em 'gether in a heap, and I'd—Damn this
pipe!'
He picked up the other half of the letter, and relighted the
pipe.
'After you, mate,' said a man sitting near, who was just biting
the end from a cigar.
THE END.
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